Details, Details

So I started my summer Spanish class yesterday. My other class, on language assessment (related to ESL), began on Monday and I am really enjoying it.

My Spanish class? Not so much. How bad is it that I can sit there in class and explain how I know she is a bad teacher? I mean, she is friendly and well-meaning, and helpful in providing vocabulary and structure when students want to give individualized answers to questions in the text.

But then she deals with grammar.

Maybe it is the linguistics major inside me. Maybe I just can't stand it when a teacher gives an inaccurate description of why a certain grammar structure works the way it does. Like when she was explaining the Arabic influence on a certain Spanish construction:

"Me gusta el gato" is the equivalent of "I like the cat." It really translates to, "the cat pleases me." Word by word:
"me pleases the cat."

She was trying to explain why it is backwards, and she said it is because Arabic is written right to left.

I was so frustrated! It is a different grammar system - nothing to do with which direction they write!

Plus, other people are having such issues following the grammar stuff. I am not, because of many factors:
a) early experience with two very different grammar systems - English and Hebrew - leaves me more open to learning new grammars
b) I did learn some French - even if I have forgotten most of it
c) my linguistics background
d) I am just good at learning grammars
But other people don't have that, and they are struggling.

Anyway, it is frustrating.

That having been said, there is one convenient thing about the class:
We miss two instructional days to visit a museum and a restaurant on our own.
Next Tuesday, I will be going to a museum. (Lemme know if you want to come. I am thinking Museo del Barrio.)
The Tuesday after that, I will not be going to a restaurant.

Instead, I will be at home, relieved that I only have half a day of classes on a fast day. :)
So that is a very good thing.

As for the restaurant, well, I am going to try to find a kosher one that sells cuisine from a Spanish-speaking country (I am open to suggestions) and, barring that, I will just write up something about Jewish Sephardi foods instead. (which she said is okay. As I said, she is nice.)

As for the sunset part, well, twice a year, the sunset aligns with the east-west blocks in the city. Which, as we know, are not actually east and west. Anyway, it happens on May 28th and July 12th. (I am not crazy. I looked it up today on a website.) And today was sunny and gorgeous. And digital cameras are convenient because I could look at the viewscreen instead of the sun, and thus not hurt my eyes.

Anyway, I got some pictures.

Ah, summer in Manhattan...

Ordinarily, getting tickets to Shakespeare in the Park means either waiting in line from about 7 or 8 in the morning for the free ones - especially if it's a weekend - or paying $100 for the convenience of not waiting. (Technically, a donation...)

Yesterday, mbarr and I walked up to the box office around 1:30 (they give out the tickets starting at 1:00) and asked for four - and thus we went to see Macbeth.

It's amazing what a little rain can do...

My favorite part? Watching the cast/crew break out the squeegees for some synchronized water herding after the half hour rain delay that, in addition to threatening the sound system (outdoor theater, for those of you outside NYC - hence the "in the park" part) also managed to soak the stage.

In general, though, the play was good. They did some very surreal stuff, especially at the end, with the way they did the various death scenes.

And we even had seats toward the front - though way off to the side...

And then tonight, another free event. Even overcast skies look good from the Great Lawn of Central Park - especially when they manage not to rain a single drop on the sea of people below - and the skyline looks cool from there when it is foggy. The fireworks at the end looked cool too.

Oh, and of course, the musical numbers were also good - the ones we could hear, anyway - but somehow it didn't matter that I missed half the words. The casual hanging-out-on-a-picnic-blanket-at-dusk-in-the-park atmosphere made me not really care if I was too busy chatting to catch the words, or if I just couldn't hear it.

All in all, I would just like to reiterate, the summer can be a wonderful time in Manhattan.

So this past Thursday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. It is also a fast day.

The fasting part went fine for me - it was the headache I woke up with in the morning that caused all the problems - it stayed with me all day, though it varied in its intensity.

It was not a particularly meaningful Yom Kippur as Yom Kippur's go for me (yes, I know, it should probably be pluralized as Yemei Kippur, but I am anglicizing the pluralization), partly due to the cantor we had, who did not know our tunes, and partly due to the weather. The liturgy has the potential to be so powerful with its combination of poetry and starkness. There is one prayer in particular that, if done properly, can bring a congregation to tears - or at least get everyone thinking and focused on the power of God and the idea of judgement. But that doesn't work when the tune so jarringly different than what you are used to. For those of you more familiar with the liturgy, you know that I am referring to the Unetane Tokef prayer.

For those of you not familiar with the liturgy, this particular prayer is at the heart of high holiday services. It describes God as a shepherd, counting his flock of sheep one by one as they pass before him and deciding the fate of each one. Then it goes on to list many of those fates: who will be born and who will die, who will die at their time and who will die before their time. Then it lists all sorts of ways people can die: "who by fire and who by water," and so on. I am forgetting the order off the top of my head, but it lists famine and thirst, earthquakes and plagues, and then more human-caused deaths like stoning. Point being, it keeps asking: who will die this way, and who will die that way. When led by the right person, those words can be so powerful. In my head, I can still hear the voice of the rabbi who usually leads high holiday services where my family goes - but alas, he was unavailable this year, so we had that other cantor.

So yeah, not such a meaningful year.

The weather also messed with things a bit. On Wednesday, as I traveled between my two schools in the middle of the morning, carrying not only my two school bags - one on each shoulder until I find the time to finally buy a backpack - but also a bag with my stuff to take home for Yom Kippur, I got rather soaked. Umbrellas don't do much when it's raining so hard that the water is bouncing up from the puddles on the pavement, when some paths are covered with a uniform layer of water that splashes up onto my ankles and into my sneakers with each new step I take. True, the top half of me stayed dry, but as I walked the five blocks or so from the subway to the school, my sneakers went from dry, to just a bit damp, to damp enough inside to wet my socks, to positively swampy. Even worse, my bags got wet - both outside and inside - so that even the extra pair of socks I carry with me - for precisely such occasions - was no longer dry when I pulled it out. Not to mention, dry socks + wet sneakers = wet socks. So my feet had to suffer through that for five hours.

It was a rather impressive rain - the kind that can soak you in the two seconds it takes to get from the covered subway platform onto the subway train itself - because this is all above-ground and outdoors where I work. The kind that is blown in at you by the air that is forced aside as the subway train pulls in. The kind that leaks in the window on the subway train and drips on the seats. The kind that turns streets to rivers - the puddles at the corners of the street were so big that I had to make detours to cross each street - and even then, the flow of water on the sides of the street was as wide as the parked cars on either side. I did a lot of jumping.

And then the weather continued into Thursday. Which meant that I had to bend the rules of Yom Kippur a bit - they say no leather shoes - but when I only have one pair of non-leather shoes, and they are by no means waterproof, there is no way I am going to risk getting them soaked on the way to the synagogue just so I can sit there for hours with wet feet. So I wore my (still damp) sneakers for the walk, and changed when I got there.

So that was my Yom Kippur.

Shabbat was sunnier - at last. It was nice to finally see a blue sky. We hadn't had one for over a week.