Shabbat/Sunday/Sukkot – Day 64/65/66
October 3, 2012
I’ll keep this post brief in an attempt to try and catch back up to date! The major event in these few days was the Newman shopping trip which essentially involved a full day’s worth of shopping. Locations visited included Macy’s, the Salvos, the ‘Coat Depot’, Florsheims and Reading Terminal Market.
My purchases were as follows:
Two pairs of dress shoes (one black, one brown, same style) – $140
One black suit – $170
One blue suit jacket – $40
Thee shirts – $60
One tie – $4
One reversible belt – $20
This took a good full day and plenty of walking about!
Late Sunday afternoon was a rehearsal of my big scene in Legally Blonde, set in Harvard Law School, where my character is an admissions counselor deigning to refuse entry to Elle Woods, the protagonist. Thankfully Anil had helped me learn my lines so all was well in that department.
Other than that, of note is the large number of sukkot that have sprung up around campus as part of a sukkah-thon in which students from Penn vote on their favorite sukkah and the winners are presented with some sort of prize.
Shul on sukkot was nice, nothing special of mention there, meals fine too. However, the best thing about being a Penn on sukkot was that many of the Jews weren’t there which meant I had a little time to get to know some of the others a bit better.
Rehearsals never seem to end for me! Monday night, as well as being Sukkot, was a two hour PGC rehearsal, followed by a two hour University Choral Society rehearsal. The policy for the most part being that missing for Rosh Hashana/Yom Kippur is all cool, with other festivals less so.
Tomorrow hopefully I’ll post some photos of the sukkot, if it stops raining!
Chassidic Philosophers
September 30, 2012
I have decided to use this space not only to post updates on what I’ve been doing but also to post the odd article or two. In this case, an article on Chassidic Jews rebelling against their communities to study philosophy in secret: Spinoza in Shtreimels
To use the provided blurb:
This past Sunday, philosophy professor Carlos Fraenkel wrote in the New York Times that “the cultural relativism that often underlies Western multicultural agendas [is] a much greater obstacle to a culture of debate than religion.” Today, in an exclusive preview from the Fall issue of the Jewish Review of Books, Fraenkel relates how his theory fared among a group of Hasidim, who gathered secretly to study secular philosophy—an activity their community views as “much worse than having an extramarital affair or going to a prostitute.”
Thursday – Day 48
September 10, 2012
BREAKING NEWS: Shaanan was accepted into the Penn Singers, the premier Light Opera/ Musical Company at Penn. As such he was partying tonight and didn’t have time for an extensive post.
Today was an all new set of classes! First up was Electrodynamics I, a post-vector calculus, Junior level physics course (PHYS320). The class was full of around forty older kids and not particularly warm and friendly. The material was difficult and the lecturer got right into it. Homework was set immediately, a series of vector calculus revision exercises that taxed my brain a fair amount. I will need to get plenty of help with that.
Next up was Operating Systems, a slightly larger class (CS380) with around fifty students. The class required an advanced knowledge of the C programming language and our first assignment was handed out immediately: writing a shell for the Linux operating system. Difficult but doable.
Finally was my random class Russian, which today went well, learning a bit more of the alphabet and the difference between the two kinds of vowels, hard and soft. Stay turned for more details.
The afternoon I coded away at the Operating Systems project, not even stopping when it was time to leave for my night activity at 6. I knew there was a second bus leaving and decided to wait for that instead.
At 6:30 I headed downstairs for ‘The Rodin Sophomore Cruise’. The bus arrived at the port at around 7:00PM and after a minute we were informed that the second bus had in fact refused to start and that we might be waiting a bit longer till we set a-sail. Half an hour passed and the remainder of the supposed attendees didn’t show. Rumours passed around and it was eventually made clear to us that the original bus too had gotten stuck along the way. Finally at around eight thirty, the last of them arrived and we finally left port. The cruise was most enjoyable and I even got to dancing, after a little prodding. Highlight of the trip was meeting a very friendly girl by the name of Stephanie from my building too and a musician by the name of Rigel from my floor.
After we returned it was quickly back to my room and, exhausted I was soon fast asleep.
<RODIN CRUISE>