5:41 AM:

The final version was as follows, with the same rules regarding omissions as last time, excepting that, in this version, not every instance of "Shmuel" was originally followed by my last name. I'm still not gonna indicate every place I've yanked it out from, though. This is a bit of a pity, as it affects the way the sentences in question read, but that's life. (If none of this makes sense to you, go back and read the past two entries before proceeding.)

Autobiographies of Shmuel In my second year as an undergraduate, I at last moved out of my parents’ home and into my own apartment. The money used to do so came from two sources: my salary for writing a weekly newsletter for an Orthodox Jewish day camp, the content of which had to be acceptable to the highest common religious denominator; and the prizes the English Department of Queens College gave me for an essay about the word “fuck.” To say I’ve been leading a double life would be an oversimplification. * * *Shmuel, Orthodox Jewish fundamentalist, was born in New York in 1973. He began attending kindergarten at [school] three years later, and graduated from the elementary school in 1986. Most of each day was spent in religious instruction, with secular studies relegated to the final few hours. He was taught to read and write Hebrew before getting to English, and Pre-1A was conducted primarily in Yiddish. He was never very good with Hebrew or Yiddish, and frequently daydreamed in class. Partway through third grade, he was sent back to second in religious studies, although he stayed where he’d been on the secular side. This disjuncture continued until his final year in the school, when he skipped the seventh grade on the religious side -- for reasons of expedience, not performance -- and went to eighth in both. Matters continued accordingly at the [school] high school; Shmuel’s performance in Talmudic study was mediocre, with flashes of potential that served only to frustrate everybody involved. In twelfth grade, his religious teacher convinced him to study in Israel the following year, which was a transforming experience. Having had doubts for some time, Shmuel finally snapped there, spending several days arguing theological points with half the school, holding nothing back. And lost. And found religion, or at least a new sense of purpose. He then went back to [school] for four more years of intensive Talmudic study before returning to Israel for the second time. * * *Shmuel, English geek, was born in 1975 or 1976, when he taught himself to read, with the assistance of Sesame Street. He was enthralled by the written word from the start: one of his earliest (and happiest) childhood memories is of being curled up inside a piece of furniture in the hallway, reading Little Women. In first grade, his short story, “The Mystery of the Seder Plate,” was acclaimed by the principal. Most importantly, he was given a public library card -- with full privileges to take out books from the adult section -- almost as soon as he could write his name on it. Fridays meant trips to the library for more books, and Friday nights were spent reading them all. Bliss. Over the years, Shmuel kept up a steady stream of song parodies, light verse, and political satire. He edited his high school yearbook, helped start the [high school's] first-ever student newspaper, co-wrote four school Purim plays, sold a lucrative set of notes for the English Regents exam, ghostwrote a prototype advice column on Jewish issues, and spent nine years writing the [camp newspaper]. * * *Shmuel, radical individualist and moral relativist, was born somewhere along the way. Even in the religious class he’d been demoted into, he was among the younger students, and he was constantly picked on. Matters reached a head in the sixth grade, when he was beaten up by his classmates daily. This was the most important factor behind his skipping to eighth grade, where the only person to beat him regularly was the rabbi. There are those who claim that attending school teaches one how to fit into society; the only thing it taught Shmuel was that society wasn’t really worth fitting into, and that the only person he could trust most of the time -- and cared to answer to -- was himself. The cornerstones of his own belief system were that nobody had the right to meddle in anybody else’s life; that everyone’s worldview was equally valid; and that anyone had the right to do whatever they wanted, provided that it didn’t hurt anyone else. This led to his insistence on upholding the First Amendment above all else. * * *Several more autobiographies ought to be included here (including that of Shmuel, trans-curious crossdresser), but I’m running out of space. Briefly, then: I went back to Israel a second time, and discovered that I hated the country, hated the people, was never meant to be a full-time Talmudic scholar, and that I couldn’t wait to get back to America. It would be an exaggeration to say that I lost my religion there, but not by much. Upon my return, I began attending Queens College as an English major. The work was interesting, the faculty was interested, and -- for the first time -- I was surrounded by people who found writing and literature to be as fascinating as I did. I worked my butt off, and loved it. I got a column in the school paper, won a bunch of writing awards, and pretty much put my life in the Orthodox Jewish world on hold-- I still kept all the commandments, but wasn’t socially involved there, and had ideological problems to work out. I came to realize that being an Orthodox Jewish moral relativist was a contradiction in terms, and avoided the problem by not having a life outside of school. It’s only been recently that I’ve come to understand how much my Talmudic training has affected my approach towards writing, academia, and life in general; it’s taught me to passionately argue every point, to brook no inconsistencies, and to seek out a logical framework that will account for every aspect of my life and society. Part of my motivation now is to examine the various worlds I inhabit, and come up with some sort of synthesis, or at least figure out how I fit into them. I could write several books about it. I’d like to.

As promised in my last entry, here's the first run at my autobiography, omitting a few names to keep the search engines at bay. (All are indicated in brackets, excepting my last name, which originally appeared after every instance of "Shmuel" in the original.)

Autobiography of Shmuel I was born in 1973, just days before Skylab was launched. It didn’t stay up for long. This was probably a coincidence. I began attending kindergarten at an Orthodox Jewish school in Far Rockaway, NY in 1976, having taught myself to read (with the assistance of Sesame Street) in the interim. Two years later, the school building was condemned, and [my elementary school] moved to new quarters. This, too, was probably a coincidence. In first grade, I wrote a short story, “The Mystery of the Seder Plate,” which was acclaimed by the principal himself. No copy of it remains, thank goodness. In fifth grade, my cousin and I collaborated on The Jewish Mess, a parody of the popular weekly paper, The Jewish Press. This was distributed to our relatives on Purim. They pretended to appreciate it. In sixth grade, I plagiarized a limerick. I still feel guilty about that. I know it’ll come back to haunt me eventually, perhaps destroying my future career in politics. In tenth grade, now at [my high school], I began writing a series of poems, short stories, song parodies, and other bits of comedic material during math class. The better bits were eventually compiled and self-published as three volumes of Collected Writings of Shmuel, which were once again distributed to friends and my long-suffering relatives. In eleventh grade, I continued my writing regimen, and I damn near flunked math. This was not a coincidence. In twelfth grade, I was the editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook. This involved very little actual editing, and quite a bit of badgering of classmates to write material and bring in advertisements. Nevertheless, it all worked out well in the end. The first year after high school, I went to study the Talmud in Israel. While I’ve always been Orthodox Jewish, I was, by that point, seriously questioning the religion. After arguing several theological points with half the school, holding nothing back, I ended up convinced that Orthodox Judaism was, in fact, right on the money. I also found an ideology that worked for me at [a particular school]. It would be an exaggeration to say that I found my religion there (ideologically, if not in actual practice), but not by terribly much. The second through fifth years after high school found me back at [high school, also a seminary], still plugging away at Talmudic studies, dreaming of Israel, and often bored out of my mind. To combat the last of those, I started a one-man advertising agency, [name omitted], the primary purpose of which was to put up humorous signs advertising the company on the school’s bulletin boards. The secondary purpose was to make signs for other people in the school, financing my addiction to creme-filled brownies in the process. Some of my better efforts were collected in Bulletin Board Blues, for which people actually paid money. Also in the above period, I co-wrote and directed the school’s annual Purim play all four years, sold a lucrative set of notes for the English Regents exam, ghostwrote a prototype advice column on Jewish issues, typeset wine and liquor labels for a local importer, served on the editorial board of [high school's] first-ever student newspaper, wrote a newsletter for a local Jewish day camp, and created a couple dozen flyers for a local youth group. I also proposed writing a column for a local community publication, which promptly went out of business. This was probably a coincidence. The sixth year after high school, I returned to Israel and discovered that the ideology I’d liked the first time now didn’t work for me at all; that I hated the country, hated the people, was never meant to be a full-time Talmudic scholar, and that I couldn’t wait to get back to America and go to college as an English major. It would be an exaggeration to say that I lost my religion there (ideologically, if not in actual practice), but not by terribly much. The seventh year after high school, I began attending Queens College. The work was interesting, the faculty was interested, and—for the first time ever—I was surrounded by people who found writing and literature to be as fascinating as I did. I worked my butt off, and loved it. In my second semester, I began working at the Queens College Quad, the school’s student newspaper. I spent a few semesters on the Editorial Board and then stayed around as a columnist. My column, [column name with a humorous play on my last name], ran to a total of 69 installments over seven semesters. The opinions expressed therein will probably come back to haunt me eventually, perhaps destroying my future career in politics if the Limerick Incident proves to be insufficient. I entered the annual QC English Department writing contest four times, picking up a total of ten awards, not to mention a scholarship. I dominated the awards for an Essay in the Orwell Tradition, and Wit and Intellectual Excellence, for my nonfiction essays and my newspaper column. (The latter was noteworthy in that I hadn’t submitted it to the contest.) In my second year at QC, I achieved my long-held ambition of moving out of my parents’ home and into my own apartment. The money used to do so came from two sources: my salary for writing the [camp newspaper], the content of which had to be acceptable to the highest common religious denominator; and the prizes I’d gotten for an essay about the word “fuck.” This paragraph could stand in for my entire autobiography. I graduated with honors in English, and began a doctoral program at the University of Michigan. This was a disaster, but I’ll address that elsewhere in this application. I am now writing my autobiography as part of my application to an MFA program in Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. With any luck, this won’t come back to haunt me eventually. But if it does, I’m not really expecting to enter politics anyway.

So, getting back to that travel diary...

I arrived in New York on the evening of Thursday, January 30th, and proceeded to my brother's apartment in Brooklyn, where I was staying. I'd gotten some rest on the plane, but was still pretty tired, which was problematic, as the grad school application deadlines were all that Saturday, February 1st, and I still had rather a long way to go.

It was that evening that I had a thought that filled me with horror, not because of its content per se, but because I had trouble accepting that I'd had it in the first place: the thought that I needed my sleep, because I wasn't twenty-five anymore.

I am so not ready to be thirty, no matter what the calendar claims about it being just three months away. I'm just gonna keep right on celebrating my nineteenth birthday, year after year, until I get it right. And then I'm gonna keep celebrating it some more, because once I do get it right, I don't plan to give up a good thing.

But I digress.

So... somewhere along the way, I realized that I effectively had three deadlines, not one, which made matters rather easier, given the way I work. Sarah Lawrence College accepted only paper applications; their deadline was thus the last possible minute I could get to the post office on Friday afternoon to express-mail it out, while still having time to return to the friend I'd be staying by before Shabbos. Emerson College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago both accepted online applications, and both had midnight deadlines, giving me time on Saturday night (after Shabbos) to finish 'em; and Emerson was located in the Eastern time zone, and SAIChicago was in the Central one, so the two would be an hour apart. Granted, I was applying to two programs at Emerson, the deadlines for which would hit simultaneously, but this was still an improvement over the original belief that everything would need to be at the post office on Friday.

I started with Sarah Lawrence. Rather than asking for one short essay explaining one's life, one's goals, and everything, SLC asks for three separate essays, the first of which is supposed to be an autobiography, with a 1,000 word limit.

I wrote the first draft of this at Erin's place. It was cute, it was amusing, and it even had some relevant information, but it wasn't organized in such a way that the relevance of that information was particularly clear, and it wasn't especially focused. There was one paragraph near the end that I said could stand in place of the whole essay, but this raised the question that, if this was the case, why did it seem disconnected from everything else therein? It was a fair point.

(Also, one running gag failed to pay off as well as it should have, but that was a more minor concern.)

So, on Friday, I took the paragraph in question, transplanted it to the start of a new file, and pretty much wrote a whole new essay from there, recycling occasional small bits along the way. I think it turned out better, though. (Both versions will follow shortly.)

Also on Friday, I wrote another essay on the subject of why I was interested in an MFA in Writing (definitely the harder question to answer, especially as I dealt with the question of what had happened in the past year and a half, finally arriving at my official party-line answer at last), and then quickly dashed off a much shorter essay on why I specifically wanted to do so at SLC.

During all of this, I went from my brother's apartment to my friend's apartment, and continued typing while he set up his new laser printer-- he'd bought it some some before, but hadn't gotten around to connecting the thing until I provided a catalyst. I now have a new appreciation for "Plug and Play"; in this case, it went without a hitch. So I printed everything out, we rushed to the post office down the block (I'd budgeted in the fact that it was, in fact, down the block), I filled out the envelope while we stood on line, and... well, naturally, with about six minutes to go until the start of Shabbos, the credit card machine would run out of paper when it came time to print my sales slip. But they quickly put in a new roll, we got home in time, and that much was well with the world. One down, three to go.

10:20 PM:

You know what I hate about Friend or Foe? There's no way of defending oneself in the "trust box"; if one person chooses "foe," no matter what the other chooses, she loses. The game needs a third option: "smackdown." Played against "friend," the other person takes it all; played against "foe," you take it all; played against "smackdown," both lose. That'd change this from a game show with a frustrating and stupid gimmick to a game show with some genuinely interesting strategy in the endgame.

(Of course, it would also make "friend" the option with the best odds, having a two-in-three chance of ending up with money where the others have only one-in-three, but I see that as an additional advantage, not a flaw.)

I'm back in Ann Arbor, by the way, and just seething in anticipation as I wait for the postman to show up with all my mail from the past month.

More to follow on the past week soon enough...

You can buy replacement kazoo resonators online!

Trust me, this qualifies as a Big Deal. Much cheaper than buying a new kazoo every time my old one gets worn out, especially considering that, in my experience, "buying a new kazoo" has generally involved buying several in search of one with the right tone.

I'm ordering a couple dozen, which should include a few that meet my specifications. Oh, this just rules.