Out of Focus

Lately, I've had much more trouble focusing than in general. Sure, I could make this whole blog post about...let's go ride bicycles. But really, it's more than that. I think I'm actually becoming self-destructive. For instance, last night, I got so bored waiting for my bus, that I took another bus coming (thanks free bus!) just to move a little bit. Turns out that the other bus wasn't on it's usual track, so I ended up missing my own bus altogether, and getting home 40 minutes later. Needless to say, I was a tornado.
At home, my apartment is a mess. I have tons of dry-cleaning I need to do, but I haven't managed to get to the dry-cleaner in the last 2 weeks. I've only barely started my independent study for school, still, and I'm getting worried that I'm wasting my advisor's time. And I'm not really sure how to fix this situation.
See, those who know me well enough know that I have an easy solution. And those who don't know me well enough shouldn't worry about it. But I'm genuinely concerned. My classes have been fairly successful, and I'm afraid to mess with a good thing by getting back in to the old routine. So now what?
Here are my choices:
1) Stop wearing dress clothes and walk more.
2) Read Driven to Distraction again. If I can get through it.
3) Back to the old routine. Anxiety be damned.
4) Try to eliminate distractions around me. But even when I'm bored by all of those (no one on AIM or messenger, nothing on TV, already finished the crossword puzzle), sometimes I found that I feel like I have nothing to do. Nothing to do? I could start with grading papers, preparing lessons, or, chas v'shalom, doing my independent research! But instead I just check something stupid on Facebook for the 80th time.
As always, suggestions welcome.
On another note, I think I discovered my complicated thought-process in a nutshell. The Tuesday NYT crossword puzzle is easier for me than the Monday one. Why? Because I over-analyze the easy Monday clues. Go figure.

Master of What?

Back to the usual identity crisis problems. Today's problem: why am I getting a masters?
To be honest, I think that I am mostly doing it to make friends. And I suppose that since I've made two of them, that's been a success.
But what about my love of the subject matter? Just when I got excited about hip hop again, I realized that I was on my own. If there's one thing I understand about my ADD, it's that I am quite bad at setting personal deadlines and following them. I am not returning my students' papers nearly as fast as I would like to, I put off learning my Torah reading to the last minute every week, and I haven't yet started work on my independent study. I'm supposed to be reading Bourdieu. I bought the book, and started it four weeks ago. I've read three pages. I sort of understood them. I downloaded the article by Regev (who should be my mentor at this point, and is technically my advisor). I haven't printed it or started to read it. Why? Because we haven't set a deadline. And I can always find something else to do with my time that does have a deadline. Or at least that I know I need to get done more eventually.
So what about my other class? I'm on strike. Why am I striking? I don't even agree with the demands of the students (lower tuition). I'm actually in favor of raising tuition and having a better financial aid system, since I don't believe one exists here at all. So I've accomplished almost nothing in this class. I don't follow the lectures because of the Hebrew. I did the reading, but they never corresponded to our discussions, as far as I could tell. I think that now, two months after the semester has started, we've covered two of thirteen topics. But I could be wrong. I have no idea.
On the plus side, I finally got into the masters program. I didn't even have high enough grades (which I think I can legitimately blame on the language issues, though it is an adjustment to be in a place without grade inflation), but they let me in anyway. Thanks guys! We'll see if I repay them by staying in the program at all.
The alternatives? Get a job that pays better than the three I currently have combined? Apply to a Rabbinical school with a dean who's so homophobic it's nauseating? Apply to a rabbinical school that's more open but is too left-wing even for me and might prevent me from getting the kind of jobs I want? Move back to America, be closer to my family and friends, but risk never making it back to Israel? Get a masters in something else? Music magazine? Full-time blogging?
Suggestions welcome.

What's in a name?

As anyone who knows me well knows, I have always been very proud of my last name. Hasit. Signifier of my Turkish heritage. No offense to my mom, but I've always been prouder to be half-Sephardi than to be half-Ashkenazi. True, my mom is much more responsible for my Jewish education (and I mean not only Hebrew school and Ramah, which she has always been involved with, but also many of the rituals we do at home, taking me to shul, etc.), but I like being unique, and being Sephardi in most Jewish worlds I've ever been a part of makes me unique. And Hasit surely caused it's share of problems. It sounds like hassit or has-it (like the words) and people would constantly mispronounce it. In fact, mispronunciations of my name may have had an even bigger impact on my identity, leading to the name Hackit. I think it's fair to say that my life is quite different because of that nickname. So I guess the mispronunciation was a good thing.
But as proud as I've been of the name Hasit (which has led to campaign slogans, Sephardi-mockeries and more), I've never really understood why it's spelled with a t instead of a d. The name is without question Hasid, as in a righteous person. My mailbox in the states is spelled that way. But in the US, our name is Hasit. And that's great for the US, but when coming to Israel, I figured it only made sense to go by the actual Hebrew name.
And that's exactly what I did when I moved here. My bank account is with a dalet. As are all of my bills, and my university registration. As I became an official resident two months ago, I figured that would be it. I would officially be Hasid, with a dalet. But of course, Israel is ridiculous in everything that it does. And the State of Israel, with Hebrew as its national language, insisted that I transliterate from my American passport. And spelled my name with a tet.
Mind you, my grandmother lived her for 20 years. And her name in this country is spelled with both a tet and a dalet. I don't know how she got away with it. But I do know that I want to spell my name how I want. And I'll be damned if I let the Israeli government get in the way.
Love always,
Hackid

Am I a Failure?

The other day, I was having a conversation with a friend who had just finished high school last year. He mentioned a favorite teacher that he did well with in his senior year, and I thought of my senior year English teacher, who inspired me to work harder my second semester senior year (getting my first A in honors English in all of high school). In the course of the conversation, I found myself saying, "That's how you know a teacher's good. When he inspires you to want to do your work." (I said he, because I was thinking of a specific male teacher. But I suppose it applies to women as well.) And then I thought about my own students. For my last assignment, not a single student handed in the paper on its due date. Nor on either of the next two days that they could have before leaving for a Kibbutz for a week. So this paper, that I assigned two weeks in advance and gave a two-day extension on for my class, was either ignored or not completed. And now it's been over a week, and I'm going back to class. Do I assume that I've failed somewhere? Do I know if my students are learning anything?
The past month of teaching has left me very satisfied, generally speaking. I enjoy the time I spend in class, I feel like I am connecting to my students, and I feel confident in my abilities to teach. None of my students is doing spectacularly, but none is failing either. I am getting mostly positive feedback from my supervisor. But the question remains, how do I know how I am doing? Can I measure myself by the strength of my students? Can I measure myself by their interest and effort? Or by the way they react to me outside of the classroom? I don't know. The biggest struggle of teaching has been finding a fair way to evaluate my students. But perhaps the bigger challenge is finding a fair way to evaluate myself.

Nothing to Blog about

Since I've unfortunately reduced my blog into nothing more than a giant kvetch fest, I have nothing to say. I mean I want a car. Please buy me a car.
And I don't like dealing with Israeli bureaucracy. And I can't spell bureaucracy without a spell-check.
My life has become somewhat normal, somewhat stable, and fairly boring. Maybe in some future post I'll blog about something of interest about problems in Israel, the poor education system, the corrupt government, the lack of public transportation on Shabbat (which I bemoan despite not traveling on Shabbat anyway). In the meantime, I have papers to grade.

Who are You?

Who are you to tell me I'm unhappy? Seriously. Post after post, lately, I've been enlightening you, friends, faithful readers, naysayers, about my trials and tribulations living in Israel. Life here isn't easy. Maybe I see at as my goal to convince gungho Zionists not to up and make aliyah without ever living here. Because even if the point of aliyah is "to live the dream," it's bullshit, unless somebody's dream is vivid enough to include a lower chance of finding a good job, an awareness of the difficulties of living thousands of miles away from loved ones, and obnoxious Israelis. So yeah. I'm happy to be living here, despite all this stuff. And even though I knew, and I have known, that it would be difficult to find work here, I didn't really know what that would feel like, and even now, I'm commuting somewhere between 4 and 5 hours a day just to do a job I enjoy and make a little money.
But you know what I'm even happier about? I'm happy that I haven't made aliyah. Yet. I'm happy that when I was 14 I decided I wanted to move to Israel when I finished college, and that I did move to Israel when I finished college. I'm happy I decided somewhere near the beginning of college that I wanted to live in Israel for a few years before making aliyah. And chances are, in the near future, I'll be happy to make aliyah. But in the meantime, I'm happy to be living here not as an oleh. And you know what else? I'm happy to be teaching at TRY. I like my students. I like the subject matter. And I really like the people with whom I work (and I hate dangling prepositions).
But what is a blog for if not to complain? Seriously, how enjoyable of a read would this be if I just talked about what's great here. Cause God knows I don't have many interesting stories. I've gone on one date this year, made vague plans with various girls which have inevitably fallen through, and maybe on my way to becoming study buddies with a rapper. But I'm not working in Israeli music television, I'm not dating an Israeli supermodel, and well, I don't even have enough of an imagination to make up some other theoretically exciting situation. So, faithful blog reader, accept this blog for what it is: a way for me to blow off steam. A way for me to kvetch about the things that bother me, so I can continue to enjoy the things that make me happy. And I'm happy. And fuck you for judging me otherwise.

PS- Dear New TRY student. Congratulations! You found my blog! Way to go!

Follow-Up

Hebrew or no Hebrew, no second date.
Possible things that this girl didn't like:
That I'm a Conservative Jew.
That I'm liberal.
That I'm younger than her.
Things that clearly had nothing to do with it:
My dashing good looks.
My dashinger personality.
And to be clear, those last two comments were not sarcastic.