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Birthright: redux / “Be Ready for the Longest Post Yet”

January 5, 2012 6 Comments

Indeed, dear reader. The previous entry, nigh on half-completed, was lost. The lord of shadowed things saw fit to rob me of my work and by extension you, dear reader, of the enjoyment of reading it. May his days be numbered, that we might again enjoy bloggéd things in the freedom of open sunlight. Alright, enough of that. Back to the topic at hand. Birthright! Wow. What an experience! Birthright ended up being amazing. A time I won’t ever forget. I hope the friends of mine preparing to embark on their own birthright trips have experiences as wonderful as mine. Before getting into it though, I should like to open with an admission: I did not go into birthright totally open-minded. I assumed I wouldn’t connect to the experience or to my traveling companions, and that my purpose in going was to travel to Israel on a free ticket, with

In the interim…

December 27, 2011 No Comments

My apologies for the lapse in communication, but I seem to have hit a technical snag (read: for some reason the WordPress app on my iPad stopped working and my whole entry about birthright might be lost.) I will do what I can to get the entry back, but of I lost it, c’est la vie. I’ll just write a new one. Brief update/summary: Birthright ended up being a fantastic experience. I am incredibly grateful to have been a part of that group, and glad even more for the opportunity to talk about issues that matter to me with thoughtful people. Seeing my Grandmother in Shave Zion has been both wonderful and slightly difficult. She is truly an amazing woman, and it is an honor and a privilege to get to spend this time with her. I’ve got just about a week left in the motherland…

A Return to the Motherland / An Open Letter to the Woman Who Sat Next to Me on the Plane

December 13, 2011 17 Comments

It is almost 10:30 PM here in Kibbutz Farod, due southwest of Tzfat in Israel. I’m back in the motherland. I’ll get to the time leading up to this moment, but I have to get something off my chest before I start. I was somewhat nervous about taking this trip. I felt unprepared and unsure about it. Arriving in Ben-Gurion, hopping on the bus and seeing Israel through the windows, it all melted away. I love Israel. It feels like home. The first step of the journey was the red-eye I took to New York on Saturday. Getting a chance to spend time with Amira and Steve is always a pleasure, and this time was no different, though it was a little difficult arriving and feeling like this. Amira was busy in the morning so I got a chance to hang out with Steve and discuss some philosophical matters over

Thanksgiving / 36 Arguments

November 27, 2011 1 Comment

Visiting my parents in southern California used to give me a strange paranoia. Returning to LA, for whatever reason, made me feel like I was regressing. (That is, of course, ridiculous.) Since college, however, Santa Monica has been a source of some much-needed emotional recharging and re-invigoration of my inspirado. I count myself among the very fortunate for having such an open, loving, supportive, hilarious family. Thanksgiving seems to me to be a necessarily stressful time, what with family, food, drink and close-quarters, but we manage to pull it off year after year. I display a certain level of unease at the whole process, but by the end it’s usually all smiles and sad goodbyes. This time around it was particularly hard leaving my sister–she and I are very close and New York is very far away. Being with my brother, sister-in-law and my nephews is always a pleasure (did you

The Pacific Northwest! Or: Winter is Coming…

November 17, 2011 2 Comments

Those who know me well know of my passion for a certain Max McDaniel, now further augmented by the zest that is Moorea Seal. (The irony, of course, is that Max and Moorea are 2 of the 6-8 of you who might read this.) Max and Moorea live in Seattle, to which I’d never been before May of this year. My first encounter with Seattle was enough to know that I love the city, and my second visit only strengthened that fondness. For some reason I don’t yet understand, I’ve had difficulty expressing exactly why I’m infatuated with Seattle. I can articulate some of it though, I suppose: it has both big-city appeal and smaller-town comfort. I felt comfortable in my own skin in Seattle, as if I were totally in my element. I watched the local folk interact and noticed more and more that their interactions felt honest. I went to

Back to our scheduled programming…

November 6, 2011 5 Comments

Well here we are; I made good on my promise to take a very long time in getting anything posted. In the (unlikely) event that you visited during the extended absence, you may have noticed that there is a difference in the motif and title of this blog. It is now quite minimal, and provides a space for one of my favorite words: warbling. I have some plans for posts, mainly on books I’ve been reading and albums I’ve heard recently. If you didn’t know, I had a music review project that I neglected: One by One Archive. I intend to continue that project here, expanding it to a general discussion of whatever media I’ve recently consumed and found interesting. For instance: Sigur Rós – Inni Inni is the soon-to-be-released live record from Iceland’s Sigur Rós. I’ve pre-ordered the blu-ray/cd combo box and am eagerly anticipating its arrival, but a

Another First

February 18, 2011 2 Comments

So it begins. Another foray into the blogosphere, but this time with a variety of motives. I would like to improve my css-fu as well as my php-fu, so I intend to fully build my own WordPress theme from the ground up. This, of course, takes a back seat to my day job, which is why this whole process is taking so long. That being said, I fully intend to finish this project, but I’m not giving myself a deadline. I see friends of mine with incredible design/code chops and I want to develop my own stuff. Of course, once the design is finished the blog will need content, will it not? That being the case, I’ve decided that the “substance” of this exercise will be collected ramblings covering anything and everything current. A real blog, if you will. Music, movies, food, drink, games, books and everything under the

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