bits of ink

I have a bunch of new posts lined up, but before I can type ’em up and post them, I have a “few” things to do:

• ECON Prelim (hopefully, I passed)
• COMS 330 Design Document for a large-scale database system that may take over my life and/or explode some time around late November.
• STS 355 essay – 3-5 pages on 19th century computers, and how they give me warm gooey feelings inside. (I still have to check whether the bits I wrote at 4 A.M. are logical, or even coherent. I may be taking bets on that one.)
• Statistics Prelim (not too painful, but those are the ones to watch out for…)
• COMS 330 Homework.
• Run around, wildly flailing my arms about and yelling at squirrels.
  (I also did a bit of general primal screaming for good measure.)
• Statistics problem set (well, I turned something in…)
• COMS 474 project, where I have to teach a stupid computer what the stupid word “activate” means. Stupid. I finally got it done, with what I thought were a bunch of errors. it turns out that those errors are not errors, but difficulties that everyone has in making a word-sense disambiguation system. I did ok.
• Write beatnik poetry for the religious college student
  Here it is:

  Must repent.
  The end is nigh.
  Problem sets?
  I go to a Godless university.
  Sigh.

• Repent.

Arrggh.

I have a piece, or more accurately,a couple of pieces, on the recent issues in Gaza. If you happen to have stumbled upon this site and are somehow unfamiliar with what’s been happening, look at the recent archives on jpost.com for about an hour, then come back here.

I started this effort, which now seems much larger than it is, because I had free time on Tisha B’Av, over a month and a half ago. I had to write something, anything, about my feelings on the Gaza tragedy. I was tired of the political arguments, ’cause, as important as it is to argue about things that matter (and boy, did this matter), by then, it was a foregone conclusion, barring a miracle. (And as much faith as I have in God to bring one, I’m not sure how much faith I have in the Jews these days to deserve it.) And what bothered me personally more was that I couldn’t decide which side of the argument I was on. Now, acknowledging that this stuff may be just a bit dated, I still wanted to share it.

(To be continued. Check back at this post later.)

Update: I had a bunch of ideas to present here, but as the whole episode drifted further into the past without my having time to comment on it, I felt like my words would be less…less…not relevant. No, that’s not the word…Maybe less impacting, less immediate. It didn’t feel like it fit any more. I intend to incorporate the ideas^* I had in thinking about this into other pieces, but for now, I think I’m putting this issue to rest. (Writing-wise, that is. My heart and prayers are still with those who were, justly or not, displaced from their homes.) If you want to understand the basics of how I feel, look at the comments.

^* Destruction and its purpose, accusing God of wrongdoing, the mental and halachic status of an onen (i.e. a very recently bereaved mourner), the concept of an emotional refractory period, and a few others.