I guess that once I got to meet and talk with my friends during the summer it’s hard to go back to my normal state of solitude. It’s as if I suddenly realized how confining it is to be without human contact aside from my family and those occasional glimpses I get from interacting with the outside world.

A jail is not in walls, or in guards, it is in the lack of a human touch. It is in pacing around in the same places over and over till you go mad. While my house may not be a jail, I’m not feeling so free either. I guess that even freedom enjoys company, once in awhile.

Sure, I have email and IM, and sure, I find myself new hobbies in brewing, baking, and programming, and sure I still read a lot, but there’s still something missing. Maybe it’s you.

I feel confined in a maze of books and mailboxes. Some mazes have doors leading into strange locations at remote corners of the earth. Mine has but one, and it leads out.

Not that out is much. I can walk downtown once in awhile, and I can go to Westgate and the library, but where else would I go? I don’t know where I should go, or when I should be there, or how, but I have to be somewhere, not just to escape, but to enrich.

I guess that in a sense this is akin to a hangover after the euphoria of meeting my friends. So please, live a bit more quietly, I’m getting a depression again.

• Since I am flying to Israel in two days (solo!), I want to make sure I have enough new music to keep me occupied, isolated and happy (to the extent one can be on a 22 hour door-to-door flight). For this reason I have just started pumping in new discs into my computer (later to be transferred to my digital music player) like I have never done before. I’m actually kind of happy I did it, because I haven’t changed the music on the player for quite a while (It’s a 256 MB player, so I can’t store all the discs I want in the same time).
• When I came back from my camping trip, I checked Patrick’s blog for new posts and found, amongst them all, a quite contreversial post about rape statistics challenging the supposed commonality of rape. After that, I decided to subscribe to Orit Kamir’s blog (Hebrew alert), and guess what her latest post was about? Rape! What is it with those inties?
• I don’t have enough pairs of pants! I’ll forget my tickets! I could miss the plane! They’ll think I’m a terrorist! Noooo!
• My mother claims that I don’t have much to do during my summer vacation. I believe to the contrary. The first month is filled extremely well.

In my writing class, we had an interesting discussion of weather the medium is the message. The discussion itself quickly moved into the field of art, and of ways to measure its quality. Personally, I think that many artists focus too much on the medium, forgetting that, indeed, it is a medium, a tool, something to be used as a mean to the end, and not as the end itself.

Patrick concurred, and added something that, though interesting, is only partially linked to the quality of art. He claimed that good art will create a new abstract concept, like Hamlet and 1984 do. Yes, lots of good art does that. This is not, however, only because it is good. The main reason is that they successfully express an important concept.

So what is the measure of good art? How can we hold art to a scale of quality, measuring it like the length of a road, like the weight of a bag of rice? The answer is that we cannot. No, I am not advocating postmodernism, claiming that quality does not exist. I am, however, claiming that no one objective scale will ever give us the quality of art.

Why? Well, think of what good art is. Good art is art that feels good; good art shakes you; good art is art that conveys something; good art stands out for itself without a direct, clear message; good art is novel; good art expresses ideas deeply entrenched in society. Obviously, it cannot be all of those at once.

It can, however, be some of that, or something else. The important is the fact that it was assembled with, and conveys, meaning, meaning being not necessarally a clear statement or a creation of a new abstract concenpt, but the subjective, undefinable, concept of meaning.

I believe that similarly, holding art to a certain medium, or to the use of a novel medium, is absurd. Some operas will be horrible, some operas will be great; some raps will be interesting, and some raps will be trash. The fact is that good artists view the rules of a medium as mere recommendations, which can be used or broken to achieve a certain result.

In the end, the mark of good art is different for every piece, and the whole expectancy of finding a measuring tape to show us what is good seems to me to be absurd.

My parents somehow insist on that we will be included in a religious community. Personally, I see no sense in it. We’re all atheists in the family, and while religion is hardly unfamiliar territory to any of us, I don’t feel comfortable entering a community in whose ideals I don’t believe. Moreover, it just doesn’t feel like the religion in Israel.

Another things that sometimes gets at me is service. Maybe i’m just lazy, but I don’t like going to service every Friaday evening just to applease to some deep need in my parents to be part of a religious community.

This evening was no exception. We made haste as I ate up some strangely shaped tofu, and jumped into the car rushing to the Congregation. Oh, well, i’ll try to enjoy it. At least i’ll have the midrash, which always contains some interesting comments about the torah.

We arrived there at 7:00, just to see that there were no cars in the parking lot. My father assumed that the we arrived at the wrong time, but comeing into the Congregation proved him wrong. There was indeed a service at that time.

We were called into the center because it was a small enough group to do so, and the service started. Somehow, I didn’t remember the music as the exact music, and Rabi Levi seemed to skip quite a lot and oversimplify issues, he also talked directly to all the small children in the audience. Small children…

I glanced into the audience again. It was probably not a coincidence that there was a little child per every adult (barring us, of course). Suddenly, it all (or most of it) came together. After the end of the service, it was indeed confirmed that this was a special service intended for small children.

Indeed, my mother looked up the times for the services, and saw a ‘Family Service’ at 7:00 before the normal service at 8:00. We came at 7:00 to a service directed at little children, and rushed ourselves unnecessarilly to the congregation. As we left, slightly annoyed, slightly amused, the real service started in a room near us.

At least my little sister enjoyed herself.

Ford is supposedly building a hypbrid 300% more efficient than today’s automobiles. This (probably) means a huge competitive edge over foriegn manufacturers.

Now, it is known that the michigan economy is dependant largely on the automobile industry (namely, ford), and that the latest losses to forien manufacturers have been causing losses to the government and, subsequently, to the schools.

Yep, we suffer from Ford’s ineptitude as it becomes harder and harder for schools to meet the budgets. However, it now seems that on my graduation year (how ironic) Ford (and, subsequently, the economy) will be back on track. Well done!