College: a first outlook

Yeah, so college kinda sucks.  Somehow it's like being a high school freshman all over again - I don't understand how all these people relate to each other.  I don't see the patterns in who hangs out with who and what the hell is going on here anyway?!?  I'm sure I'll make friends, I just won't do it at the kind of events that are being held to encourage people to make friends.  I feel like I can see what the next few months will look like, and all I can say is that I'll feel much better about how things look when I can get the hell out of here and go dancing or to the ken.

Habonim's spoiled me, I think.  And I don't have the guts to make friends in such a new and uncomfortable environment.

Now that that's been established...

So kinda piggy backing off of that last post of so little time ago, I'ma talk now about the summer.

So the summer started with me going to help build the Na'aleh Gan, which was awesomely hardcore and let me spend some quality time with Koko and Niv, who I worked with later that summer, as well as Ilan Brandvain and Rebecca, who I didn't but with whom I had some contact on Workshop. It was awesome, really empowering to watch things grow over the course of the summer and the labor of digging really made me feel good about myself physically - I really do enjoy labor, at least as an occasional thing.

And then the summer proper started, and the contents of my previous post happened. Not gonna talk about it here, but keep it in mind when reading the next bits.

So Chalutz was going well aside from that, we were making changes and the whole process was just as empowering as I remembered from the previous year (although slightly less exciting because it was less novel). I got myself set up with a chug couples dancing under the nomer "Swing Dancing" which I was running with Yonah (actually did want it to be swing, but neither of us knew how and none of our guest stars pulled through. So it was couples dancing/rikud/Yonah is awesome) and everything was looking peachy until I found out my tzevet. In terms of people it looked like what I was hoping for at the time, strengthening old connections I wanted to be stronger and meeting new cool people. But the chanichim were the tzofim (going into 8th grade), and I had really been hoping for older chanichim.

No biggie. First session went by more or less smoothly, I made new good friends and connected a bit more with some people I already knew. It was like the Na'aleh I remembered, only I was less new and scared and stupid. Not not stupid, just less so. And then it ended, and we went into intersession. I landed a rikud chug that this time attracted exactly the people I was hoping for... and I got the tzofim again, after requesting the bogrim yet again this time putting the tzofim as my third and final choice.

Now I do understand that lots of people wanted the bogrim. They always do, and this year the bogrim were particularly awesome. (Geeze if any chanichim read this they probably would blow all the wrong things out of proportion. If you're a chanich, you'd better talk to me about what you read or you'll ruin my own opinion of my hadracha!) But the thing is, I didn't just want to work with bogrim because it would be awesome (and it would). I wanted it because I had so much to process from Workshop that I knew I would never get the opportunity to do so in peulot run for me. The only way I knew of to test the validity of some of what I learned is to teach it - if you teach correctly, teaching is like an idiot test, in that if there's something you can't teach to someone mature enough grasp the concept then you probably don't understand it well enough to evaluate it for yourself yet. I needed this kinda thing, 'cause the concepts I needed to test were all that I wanted to educate about right then.

The problem with all this is that I could not think of a way to make what I wanted to talk about relevant/understandable to 8th graders. Is it doable? I'm sure. But how can I find the applications of it if I don't even fully understand it yet? I didn't get to process these things on Workshop, and I wanted/needed to do so this summer. And I couldn't. And so it came to pass that although throughout the whole thing people were telling me I was "the ideal tzofim madrich" (whatever that fucking means) I didn't enjoy this summer as much as last year because I don't feel that I taught anybody anything but how to do Rikud, and as much as doing that helped me to get through the summer in more ways than one it's just not good enough to satisfy me.

There are lots of reasons for all this and I'm sure I brought part of it on myself. But I truly think I've moved on now. Because now I have a new Messima (which is what I treated Machaneh as): the Ken.

Yep, I'm Rosh Eizor Galil this year. One of 4, all people who I am relatively comfortable with, whom I have some seperate connection with, and who I respect and can view as allies in fulfilling different aspects of my goals. A kinda dream tzevet for me.

First of all, the Shaliach is Ron Alter who is moving from Na'aleh to Galil this year. Galil doesn't know how lucky it is! From what I've seen Ron is truly dedicated to the American-Jewish community as a whole, and has a unique combination of insights and viewpoints that let him appreciate Habo's strengths and weaknesses and how Habo could better acomplish it's goals where they intersect with his. He may not believe so much in creating an alternate society but he sure as hell sees how Habo can help the society and community it's in. It's more than a job to him, it is a Messima (although I dunno if he would call it that).

Next is Ben Profeta. He was Rosh Eizor when I was a post madatz, and he knows how Eizor Galil runs. And also, he's as into Israeli Dance as I am! I think my connection with Bpro is probably the most impersional (since I've never worked with him, working in the Ken as a post madatz I didn't really consider myself a Madrich so I don't think of myself as having been on tzevet with those people) but that doesn't change the fact that I knew going into this that I could rely on him.

And lastly, Nora Chong. Of the others I trust her vision for what the Ken should be most of all. I realize now that it's probably not gonna be what we wanted it to be on Workshop, but it's still gonna be awesome. And there's always next year. Despite this I still feel like Nora's not totally comfortable with me for some reason, and I don't know if I'm totally comfortable with her because of that. I feel like we need to sit down and talk, but I really don't know what about. Is she uneasy because she didn't know some of the things I wrote on my last post? Is she worried I'm gonna make a move on her? (I could rant for a year about how much easier it is to have meaningful non-sexual relationships with women when they're shomer negiah - once everybody accepts THAT's not gonna happen, everyone can relax more.) Whatever it is I hope it gets fixed soon. Having her there as someone to act as an ally and confidant would really make going through college so much easier, especially if I don't end up in a Bayit somehow next year.

Anyway, I feel like the Ken is going great. By which I mean that the Ken is going fine and I feel like I'm doing my part to make it that way - maybe even more than my part, because I have enough free time on my hand that I've put in possibly as many hours making sure things get done 10 times as thoroughly as they need be as everyone else (except Ron, for whom this is a full time job) has had time that they COULD be working on the Ken. Being in college will end this, but I think I've shown that I'm willing to put a significant amount of my free time into doing Ken work. This year looks promising, even though my post-workshop life got off to a rotten start.

Post Workshop Blues

Greetings my loyal readers. I always wonder who you are - I go long enough between entries in general that I often get a person or two tell me that they read this and I'm like "Woah, cool. And weird - I don't expect people I know to actually read what I write here."

Anyway, enough stalling. So Workshop, since my last entry, has ended. I was going to write that it's dead and gone, but I don't necessarily know that that's true yet. A couple things have come up to connect me to Workshop since it's ended, which makes me think that I haven't seen the end of the relationships that I formed and the "educational processes" that I started during that serendipitous year in Israel. These things have ranged from my beloved madricha Ruth Stevens calling to ask if I had anything cool about the jewish holidays to contribute to this years Boneh (to think, I might be able to affect the tochnit so soon after I'm off it! Awesome oppurtunity that I still haven't taken advantage of.) to Andrea Varsany starting a checkin on our listserve. Both of these were good things; not everything that reminds me of Workshop is.

The first thing that made me reevaluate the way I thought about Workshop was one of the latter categories, the negative. So I come to work at Na'aleh and people ask me some questions about Workshop like which kvutza I was in (Shesek, reppin' it up!) etc, when someone lets loose the words "I hear you guys smoked alot of pot." Now I don't know whether I had suspected it deep down or not, but any suspicions I had had were deeply enough suppressed that I was shocked. I asked em who had told em that, and they said they had just heard it spread around. God knows rumors spread quickly enough that that was almost undoubtedly true. From that point the conversation fades from my mind - what was left was a deep suspicion and sense of, for lack of a better word, betrayal.

So I talked with some people about it, enough to confirm that it was indeed true. It seems that it was a secret whose circle of those privy to it expanded slowly as Boneh and Kaveret wore on. Knowing all this gives me new tools to look back at times when people acted in ways I didn't understand, not as in acting like they were stoned (still can't recognize that) but by asking things like "Do you know what goes on in our kvutza?" or "Does it bother you that you don't know everything that goes on in this kvutza?" (which is an incredibly stupid question by the way, since if I knew enough to answer the question would be invalid). I started to realize that these were times when people did everything short of saying "Hey, you know people in this kvutza smoke pot right?" in order to try and clue me in on what's going on, to make me ask the questions and figure things out. And I'm pretty sure that my mind brushed close to a truth that it didn't want or know how to deal with a couple times, and maybe this caused a couple of the funks that I fell into on Workshop. And the way I came out of those funks I bet was by burying this deeper and deeper each time.

Why didn't I just follow what I logically should have noticed in all the time I spent in that house? I suppose I didn't want to add the complication of learning how to live in an environment with pot to my existing difficulties with fitting into the Workshop environment. And I dunno. Like it's still really hard for me to think about all this. I don't even feel angry about it any more (although I did at the time - before I realized that I should have figured this out I was damn furious and wanted nothing to do with my kvutza) I just feel... weird. Confused. Disconnected. I dunno what it is. Feelings that I haven't dealt with much since the early days of Workshop, or maybe since early in High School. Bah. Hopefully you know what I mean, 'cause I'm not gonna be able to communicate it to you any clearer than that. Moving on.

So yeah, that was kinda a rotten way to start the summer, especially considering that I had otherwise been feeling very welcomed, even somewhat competent since I had helped out during pre-pre-con during construction so I was more comfortable with Na'aleh's new site than most other people which made me feel good. But then this came, and if it hadn't been for some conversations I had with Xander and Ruth, and later with HPot, I probably would've written an angry letter to the listserve that would have been as likely to destroy any relationships I had had with members of my kvutza as repair them. Still haven't done much in the repair business - I've needed to prepare myself more before I'll be able to face some people enough to do it. I hope I'll have dealt with this enough - even after having talked it over a few different times with different people this still makes me upset enough to almost make me sick to my stomach with the whatever-they-are feelings.

What bothered me about it initially was probably what you'd expect - shame that I had been made a fool of in front of my tzevet and myself by having been ignorant of such an aspect of my kvutza's culture after having lived in it for months at a time, hatred of the ones who I'm always quickest to blame for things like this, confusion over how I had missed something like this but shame most of all. After a while I got over that, I've accepted what happened and if I don't like it I think I've started to understand why I didn't realize, and of course why it happened is probably as simple as why people smoke pot in general and just as unimportant to me. What still kinda shocks and upsets me to this day is that nobody told me when they found out.

Plenty of people who I thought would have told me knew, even as much as a month before the end. Looking back, as I said, I can see how most of them tried to tell me in their own ways. But when they saw that I didn't know what they were talking about, why didn't they just come right out and fucking tell me!?!?!?!? It's like what's been troubling me about communicating with people since forever. My weakest point failing me in my hour of most crucial need. But why, seeing that I somehow didn't understand and probably being bright enough to guess that I would be hurt if I found out third hand as was sure to happen, didn't anyone cut the bullshit (that is wrapped around most important things that people want to say to one another) FOR me and just tell me? Were they scared? Is it such a strong social taboo to tell someone about it? Did they actually think I would choose not to know if I let myself make a concious choice? Did they think I'd be able to fool myself forever? Did they just not care enough? I don't think it's the last one, but I just don't know. And what bites still. I just don't know.