Happy Jew Year: Part 2

OK, so today I went in with this great attitude: "OK, since I'm in the 'Teen Service' this'll be bearable. And Mara (the awesome youth director) will run the service quick and dirty like she did last year and I'll survive."

NOPE.

Mara decides she's gonna go to the adult service and leave some 25 year old who has the mind of a 50 year old with his newlywed wife who are both obsessed with talking about how they just got married in July to run our service. And, DANG, they had no DAM IDEA WHAT THE HECK THEY WERE DOING. They told us how this was gonna be the "coolest service in the whole state."

Haha...haha...HAHAHAHA.

They were SO CLUELESS. I can't even DESCRIBE it!!!

.....I'M GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!

And then my four o' clock dinner went exactly as expected: great food, crappy socialization.

Pure proof of how completely SUCKISH the Jewish holidays really are.

Happy Jew Year: Part 1

Well, as of tonight at sundown, the year 5769 began, according to the Jewish Calendar. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the calendar the is most commonly followed nowadays is the Christian calendar, since it kinda revolves around the birth of Jesus. Before him, though, everyone followed this calendar, so when the newfound Christians were saying it was the year 1, everyone else was saying "No, it's 3761!"

Anyway, for those of you who are like "Oh, I love holidays; this must be so much fun!" ...Think again. It's one of the top 10 most boring days in a Jewish kid's life. You sit in services for about four hours, and then you come home and you can't do anything. Then you go to your relative's house and sit around doing nothing there while your parents and aunts and uncles talk for forever, along with all your cousins, who are all grown up and in college if not beyond, so you've got no one to even hang out with. Then, there's the one good part: the food. If there's one good thing that happens on the New Year, it's the feast that your aunt prepares. Matzo ball soup, turkey, your grandma's amazing noodle kugel (if you don't know what that is, look it up), and of course, the meatballs-and-rice dish that she only makes once a year. Ah, the food is great...

Then you're so full that you just want to go home and sleep, but no! That would make too much sense! Instead, you are stuck at your aunt's house with nothing to do for another hour and a half. By the time you finally leave you feel like you're gonna puke, but you somehow make it home ok. By that time it's 10 o' clock and the day is shot.

Then, the next morning, guess what? YOU GET TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN!!! Who wants to be at school with your friends and jeans and the English language when you can be stuck in services for yet ANOTHER rousing four hours of non-stop Hebrew and sitting all dressed up?

So before you go up to a kid and say, "Oh, you're so lucky you get to miss a day of school for a holiday," think about what they'll be doing: you might change your mind.

The value of a song

Music...have you ever noticed how much we worship it? I mean, seriously: about 70% of all mainstream celebrities are famous because they are musicians. Think about some of the names that are plastered on the covers of People and OK! and other front-line magazines. The Jonas Brothers, Britney Spears, Jamie Lynn Spears, Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Miley Cyrus, to name a few. Although all except the Spears are owned and overly-publicized by Disney, they are all still musicians. And, even though they aren't necessarily smart people for that matter, they are what our society worships.

And then think about the market: One of the most-sold electronic gadgets on todays market is the iPod, a music player. (OK, they do do other things, but they started out as just music players.) And Apple Inc. is now making a fortune off iPods and the iTunes Store.
So if our society loves music so much, then why are young musicians ridiculed?
"Oh, they're chasing an empty dream." "They'll never make it as a musician. Don't they know how small the odds are?" "They should spend their time doing more constructive things that will help them later in life." Blahblahblahblahblah. And, even though the odds are small, and maybe it's not a good life to be a celebrity, think about what even the idiot adults who say those things do for leisure: A good amount of them will go to a symphony at least once a year, and pay a hundred dollars to see those "geniuses" perform.
Now take a step back maybe, eh, 20 years for these people in the symphony. If the first-chair violin player is only 25 years old and is first chair in the National Symphony, he/she has probably been playing for at least 10 years, more like 15. So if he/she is 25, that means they will have started playing violin between the ages of 10 and 15.
And those obnoxious operas they go to. Oh, they can't get enough of them. Think about those singers: they were probably singing in their elementary school chorus, dreaming of being a star. And now, they're singing in an opera every evening, getting paid thousands of dollars per show. How many kids are like that nowadays, imagining themselves, maybe not in an opera, but being a professional singer? And even though maybe two out of the 100 kids in the 5th grade chorus will actually become pros, that's a difference made for those two people. 

It's like that story we've all heard a million times about the old guy throwing beached starfish into the ocean. And the kid comes up to him and says, "There's hundreds of starfish on the beach, and you can't possibly throw all of them back into the ocean. It won't make a difference." And then the old guy throws one in and says, "It made a difference to that one."

The point I'm getting at here is that those "sophisticated, realist" people, and they're not just adults: there's kids like that too... They're just big fat stupid hypocrites. They respect those "amazing violinists" and those "incredible singers" that they see at those annoying show, yet when they see an eleven year old with a real gift on the trumpet, and he's dreaming of one day playing first-chair for a Broadway show, they tell him how small his chances are and that he needs to focus on something that is "within reach."

Bottom line, people need to look at the people they respect, and realize that those people were kids once, too. And they too started out with a little violin that they got for their birthday, and played in their school orchestra. You have to start somewhere.

So think about that next time you see a sixth grader carrying around her oboe, and dreaming of becoming the next Chopin.

Are you kidding me???

Sarah Palin is this popular??? You've got to be kidding me. In case you're not aware, she wants to make abortions illegal. Someone who wants to tell people what operations they can and can't get? Sounds more like a communist if you ask me.

And then she can't even do an interview. Don't believe me? Take a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nokTjEdaUGg . "Uhh...ummm....I-I....umm"... Oh yeah, she'll be great when she's speaking to the entire country.

Not to mention she's got NO EXPERIENCE. Think about this: Obama's been running for president longer than she's been in office. And she'd be leaving a newborn son with Down syndrome, her pregnant seventeen year old daughter, and her son that just went into the army to go work a job that takes more than 24 hours a day. How can we expect her to take care of our country when she can't even take care of her own family?

If you're a Palin fan, please post a comment (if you're not, you can post one anyway) telling me what you see in her, cause I'm dying to know what people see in her.