Working hard on Hebrew.

Every once in a while I pull down my Hebrew bible and just try to sound out a paragraph as carefully as quickly as a I can.

If I recognize a word, sometimes it comes quick.

Overall, it doesn't, though. The other day in class the instructor wrote a verse from Jeremiah up on the board to have us sightread, and I was only 1/3 of the way through when someone pronounced it thoroughly and gave an accurate translation...

A shitty meal in San Francisco.

So, one day during a break from the conference, I took a walk since it was nice out, and came across this price-y soup restaurant downtown that had signs outfront for being one of the "Ten Best Sandwich Places" etc. from local free newspapers, and they had all these signs up for how they use organic and locally-sourced ingredients.

So, I ordered "soup and sandwich" special, getting a steak sandwich on baguette and a bowl of fresh mushroom soup.

Honest to G-d, both the soup and the sandwich were so bland and underspiced it was unbelievable. I don't know what it was, but though both looked appetizing, they had very little natural taste, and almost no spicing. I almost went to return them, but I didn't, because then the people would have to throw them out.

Instead, I just put a lot of salt and pepper on them and made the best of it.

But, the entire time I was thinking, "This place is good?", and, "So you use locally-sourced ingredients, but shouldn't you at least know how to prepare them?:

What a *huge* disappointment. All the greasy spoon restaurants I went to (burgers, kebabs) were very ho-hum too.

Uplifting sight.

Yesterday morning I was commuting into school and waiting to get the bus, and the bus came up all jam-packed with (black) passengers, and I got really really pissed thinking of how (white) people in other parts of the city didn't have to deal with chronically over-crowded busses like that.

As the people poured out of the bus, this (short) (mid-30s) (black) woman with an apple bottom waddles out with a big black hoodie with a picture of a large pink ribbon and the slogan -

SAVE THE TA-TAS

- and I just brightened up and realized that nothing could ever keep her down.

My verdict on San Francisco.

San Francisco is beautiful, with the hills and the water and everything, and all the great houses in the wealthy parts of town.

It's also amazingly compact, and reminds me of Manhattan-like pedestrian densities in a lot of town, which is unbelievable for a town with a 700,000 or so population.

But, I hated having to admire the rich, and felt weird going around and staring at all those houses and liking them, and thus indirectly having to gawk at their wealth and feed their egos.

Also, no-one seems to be able to live there anymore, which automatically reduces a city's coolness quotient by 300%.

Also also, in terms of patios, cool coffee shops, and delicious locally-sourced food, as well as cheap eats, Milwaukee is a much much superior city!

Insight (2 of 2): Tarot.

One of my other colleagues who I ran into heard that story, and so she told her story -

She grew up in West Virginia, and even though she looked like a punk with a shaved head and long mohawk and stuff, she was a good kid, but didn't know where she belonged, so she went to go see this regionally famous tarot card reader, a woman named Betty and lived in a trailer, and on Sat. nights like 12-15 cars would line up on the road outside her property, each waiting in turn to see her for their half-hour session (! - people waited a long time).

So, my colleague who had the punk haircut finally got in there, and she was terribly unimpressed by the reading. She doesn't remember too much, except that the woman assumed she had problems with her parents and drugs, and she didn't.

"And don't keep sleeping with those black boys," Betty told her, too.

Insight (1 of 2): My one Dutch friend's wife.

So, when I was at a recent conference, I got to catch up with a lot of people, including my one Dutch friend.

His wife, who is a pensive Israeli hippie who ended up in banking, has astounding insight, he says; she just kind of sits around being tense and not interacting much, but then she comes up with very accurate judgments.

For example, one of his colleagues is a psychologist and my one Dutch friend liked him because he was outgoing, funny, etc., but then when he and his wife went to the guy's house for a party, she didn't interact with him, but when they got home, she was like, "There's something wrong with him, he has done something evil to people."

So, they googled him and found out that he had been in trouble for getting with his therapy patients, oftentimes by withholding medications.

Another time, after she briefly met someone else, she was like, "He is not well," and only later did my one Dutch friend find out that that guy had serious health problems.

Lost a student.

I think I lost my 2nd high school student.

He didn't want to study Latin, but has to take 4 years for his high school.

I admitted that could suck and that the poetry they were assigning was hard, but that he had a knack for converting forms as if it was a spoken language, and he just had to get on a twice-daily study schedule for endings and then maybe vocab.

He did that for a week and got results, but then quit and said he would never get an "A" no matter how hard he tried.

I tutored again but he just wouldn't get back on the study schedule, and the parents said they'd let me know if they needed my help again.

I guess the problem is that maybe I didn't encourage much, and that you can't motivate a person, they have to motivate themselves.