Lunchbox

Every August, Majken’s mom and my mom (both named Robin) discussed the budget for our annual back-to-school shopping trip. Being next-door neighbors and vaguely competitive best friends, equity was the only option. So much for discretion or individualized parenting, our block was socialist territory. The parental pipeline ranged anywhere from $100 to $200, which easily trumped anything we made babysitting for four bucks an hour.  Special years like ninth grade tipped the scales closer to two Benjamins, but only after much pleading: “but momuhhh, we’ve outgrown everything, and no one wears baggy jeans anymore. Don’t you want me to have friends?”  Brilliant persuasive reasoning, or so we thought. 

Before hoofing it to the mall, we plotted our spending and asked our dads for an extra $20.  The day was spent contemplating two for one corduroys from the Gap, five for $25 Abercrombie and Fitch underwear with weirdly sexual slogans meant to emblazon pre-teen butts, short denim skirts for imagined parties and tee shirts in one size too slutty.  Spare change scored us brightly colored folders and a fruity scent of Bath and Body Works lotion to keep in our shared locker.

We wanted the most bang for our buck because this was the stuff of fresh beginnings— materialistic armor to protect us from first day of school anxiety while simultaneously aiding in our tireless climb up the social ladder.  Items purchased with our funds gave us something to hold onto as we compared schedules, talked summer and tried to look cute in muted corduroy that seemed all wrong off the rack. We planted our converse-clad feet on the ground while social groups formed from nothing. Middle school and high school are the time-lapse photography version of real life: act quick or you might sit next to a weirdo in biology. 

Several Augusts later (and for three more after that), I drove my blue Subaru from the top of Oregon to the bottom of California just in time to slap sheets on my twin bed, buy a new Norton Anthology for about the same price as my former budget and head to class.  College is about playing blasé, acting like first days are child’s play while trying desperately to make all the pieces fit together without the help of parents.  Share your summer break escapades with floppy boys. Throw on a carelessly perfect ensemble that you definitely did not spend twenty minutes selecting.  Once clad, mine your post-modern vocabulary so you can spit something smart in American Lit. 101b even if you failed to complete the summer reading.  Feel the build-up of newness and the letdown of sameness as you slide back into routine.  But relish these last first days because once college is over, you’re done. 

Or not.

In a turn of events I never saw coming, my life still cycles around first days of school. In fact, I haven’t not had a first day of school since I was two and enrolled in Jewish preschool.  As a teacher, I’m mostly immune to the social pressures of the first day and probably spend too little time contemplating my outfit and doing my hair. I am pleased to say I have grown past inappropriate slogans on my butt, transitioned I hope to something less overt.  Somehow, though, the first day anxiety is still there, laced with pressures even more urgent: crafting seating charts, rolling out procedures that determine classroom functionality, remembering which periods I teach and that it’s important to eat something and pee during the ones I do not.  I must give off the impression that I am stern and no nonsense when in reality I’m scared shitless that I might mess this one up. Learn 75 names in a day or two.  Smile at children, but not too much.

At this point, I’m not sure what it would be like to lead a year-round life like most normal people. While I hesitate to describe the first day of school as pleasant—on either side of the educational fence—it does have this adrenaline that most other days of the year lack. So here we go again: my lunch is packed and my outfit is lying in a deflated LEL shape on my dresser. There are 75 photocopies on my desk, and I’m sleeping in my teacher stare.  Let’s get there.

Ideas for Weathering Irene from 95 Court

It's 11:49, and we're already bored.

Here are Majken, Abby, Claire and LEL's top ten ideas for having fun while stuck inside.

1. Make puff-paint tee-shirts that say "I survived Irene" and hope that's true.
2. Straight from Camp Laurel: Play a game of Honest Criticism, in which you sit in a circle and discuss everyone's faults.  Begin sentences with "No offense, but..."  No getting mad allowed.
3. Place all copies of Doug Lemov's "Teach Like a Champion" in weather-proof Ziploc bags so the messages of No Excuses charter school reform live on in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. 
4. Make a fort from old Ikea boxes and play Honest Criticism inside. 
5.  Form a looting team and loot the bagel store across the street even though it's still in full operation.  Bring your crowbar.
6. Play "The Hunger Games."  Contemplate your first move in a Donner Party situation.
7. Tape Lauren to a chair and watch boring movies.
8  Write our names in Sharpee on bottles of red wine and see who lasts the longest.
9. Put on your iPhone pedometer application and walk a mile without leaving the confines of your apartment.  Then, lunge a mile.
8. Stage a hurricane photo shoot. Make a hurricane playlist.
9. Create a gourmet dinner from the following: wasabi peas, Oreos, black beans and cake mix.
10.  Start a nineties cover band: Irene and the Hurricanes.  

Happy Hurricane-ing! 

http://www.todaysbigthing.com/2011/08/26?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily

I Feel the Earth Move

A good friend and I often discuss the perks of moving to San Francisco: proximity to skiing and family, west coast vibe and temperate weather.  His inexplicable fear of earthquakes, though, keeps him grounded east while wistfully considering a westerly relocation.  Ironically, he was visiting his brother in the Bay when the earthquake hit New York on Tuesday. This coastal confusion may make it harder to keep him in the city.

The bookshelves in my room started quaking, and my first thought was: “if my classroom library that I’ve spent hours organizing starts to implode, I’m quitting.” A vision of my body uncovered days later from beneath 80 copies of The Giver flitted through my mind. Teachers popped their heads out of classrooms, and when we determined the movement was probably not the ongoing cafeteria construction reverberating from the first to fifth floor, a scared East Coaster screamed “Earthquake!”

In Portland Public Schools, we practiced earthquake more than fire.  In case of an earthquake, we learned in kindergarten to duck under the desk, stand in a door jam or cover your head with your hand if jams and desks were taken.  One of the best exhibits at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry is the replica of a cute little house. Every fifteen minutes, Eartha Kitt’s “I feel the Earth Move Under my Feet” blasts through the fake house as the floor and cupboards start to shake beneath you.  This way, Oregonians learn the value of earthquake-proofing their homes.  In college, I flirted with danger on a campus perched on the San Andreas fault line. I was frequently reminded via campus-wide e-blast to pack my earthquake kit in case things got shaky.  Unsurprisingly, I never did.   

My 35-person staff streamed out of PS16 and immediately started checking the news on their Blackberries, calling relatives in Virginia and updating Facebook statuses with earthquake witticisms (guilty).  Californians and wannabes (guilty, again) played it cool, chilling in the sun and fielding questions from confused New Yorkers who’d never gotten down with Eartha Kitt. A Louisiana coworker asked about these strange “hurricanes of the North.” We waited outside for the Tremor Team to tell us it was okay to get back to lesson planning.  Meanwhile, my coworker brought me an iced coffee from Marlow and Sons, and I couldn’t help but wonder why earthquakes don’t happen more often in Williamsburg.    

The best part of the whole ordeal was an exciting revelation from inside our very building.  Sitting beside us outside school was a group of people who looked decidedly un-teacherly: leather fedoras, canes, short skirts, caked on makeup and lots of filming equipment.  After much hushed speculation, a coworker worked up the nerve to politely ask what this crew was doing at our school.  Apparently (and obviously?), they’re filming Trickadee’s latest rap music video on the second floor; they are, in fact, Trickadee’s sizeable entourage of backup dancers.  The guy in the burnt orange suit? Trickadee himself.  We believe Trickadee is a rapper play on chickadee, but then again we’re mostly white. 

I recognize that the earthquake and the impending hurricane are probably signs of the upcoming rapture or the Mayan Calendar’s end of days, but in the short term the earthquake panned out pretty well for me. I got to hang outside for an hour in the sun with hipster coffee, flex my West Coast knowledge and learn about a hot new rap artist whose hit music video will feature the famed hallways of PS16. What but the 2011 NYC earthquake can I thank for all this? Gotta give credit where credit’s due. 

The Pursuit of Artyness

My friend Emma—who now owes me five dollars for blogging about her—has been into acting since the day we met. To be exact, she has been dramatically-inclined since day one of Kindergarten when a shared pink frosted donut translated to lifelong friendship (if only it were still so easy).  Emma was the perpetual lead in our high school plays and went on to study experimental things like method acting and Ghanaian yoga at NYU’s Tisch School.  She came back to the city after college with the intention of auditioning and acting, but making dollars to write rent checks got in the way of her intentions—a tale of harsh realism we’ve all heard before—and she hasn’t done much acting since. Lately, Emma’s been excited about applying to graduate programs in social work, deciding to pursue something practical and impactful, hoping acting will fit into the life equation somehow, somewhere.    

Like I said in my last entry, I’m reading Just Kids, by Patti Smith.  The book is evocative of a faded era when New York was crawling with people pursuing art with a single-mindedness bordering on shortsightedness (okay, maybe that’s not totally gone).  In the Sixties, community developed around creation, hallucinogenic drugs and depleted funds. There was a sense of being in it together for the sake of art—that which is pure and real.  Some of Smith’s friends like Robert Mapplethorpe and Allan Ginsberg hit it big; others did not and died penniless—drugged up and drugged out—with little to show for a life spent pursuing their passion. Maybe that’s just the way it's gotta be, but Smith presents a picture of starving artists who are happily (and literally) entranced in art for art’s sake—doing it because it’s what they love.  In theory, what better reason to do something?   In practice, though, the true pursuit of art falls into the annoying category of easier said than done.   

A few weeks ago, Emma was offered and accepted the female lead in a short film made by a team of Wesleyan graduates.  On a whim, Majken, Emma’s boyfriend and I went to be extras in the film, which was shot upstate at the gorgeous house of former New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Riechel.  We were part of the party scene in which we mimed drunken excitement (not too much of a stretch), sipped on Welch’s white grape juice and watched some real acting going down from the corners of our "drunken" eyes.  Even post-hiatus, Emma was in her element: natural and real.  During a break, I asked her how things were going. 

“I forgot how much I like doing this,” she sighed, “this really messes up my plans.”  

Though an important realization to have, Emma seemed equal parts stressed and excited by her light bulb moment. Such a realization forces a question no one is really equipped to answer: What now? In some ways, it’s easier to forget that you love making art because when you suddenly remember—which you will—those carefully-crafted life plans start to crumble beneath you.  We hope we can pursue art while tending to more basic survival needs, but art so often takes last priority until it becomes an occasional diversion, akin to Thursday night kickball or that book club you infrequently attend.   After a while, that lifelong artistic passion is just one more discarded hobby.  No matter how much you talk about it, art only happens when you make it happen. Emma is only acting when she’s acting, and I’m only writing when I’m writing.  For both of us, artistic production represents a small percentage of our daily lives.  Do we still get to call ourselves writer and actor, or have those become wistful misnomers?   

Art is a tricky thing to pursue in a city where every third person’s got big talent, where coffee shops are dense with Macbook scribblers and galleries are full of modern brush strokes. For decades, New York has been the mecca to which you march to pursue creativity, hit it big and find community while doing it. Problem is that’s not quite as lovely  as it sounds.  Like Emma, I find myself caught between wanting to pursue an art form that contents me in a way that most things do not and realizing that I need to find gainful employment that also contents me in the more-than-likely chance that writing doesn’t pan out.  Though pursuit of art and gainful employment are not mutually exclusive, their happy collision is certainly rare.  Passion and practicality bite at each other’s throats as we try to figure out how to spend our waking hours.  When is art the main attraction and when must art play second-fiddle to more earthly pursuits?  What tips the scale?  

All this forces a rabbit hole set of questions that I spend a selfish amount of time pondering .  Why do we write, draw, act, sing or dance?  Is it with the intention of fame or is it for personal release, fun or fulfillment?  Is artistic production supplementary to the other things with which we fill our time or is art meant to take center stage?  What is our purpose or project? Once you figure that out—good luck, suckas—is that purpose personal or public?  Is our art really any good? And, even if our parents, professors and friends respond with a resounding yes, how do we ever really know?  Once we ponder these unanswerables, there’s this huge element of luck, chance and serendipity that determines whether people pay attention to your art.  Being a big deal may be the perfect storm of raw talent and crap shoot.  Perhaps the bottom line question, then, is this: Is my talent worth the crap shoot?  If yes, how much of my life do I pour into something that still offers no real certainty?  

I have a monumental amount of respect for people who make art (even more respect for those who make good art). The creation of culture is freakishly important to our society, and someone’s gotta drop everything to create it.  If you give up before you start, you will never know if you’re meant to be one of those culture creators.  What it boils down to for me, though, is that I have to find something else I really love doing, something that’s important, fun and meaningful that I will feel good about even if it means placing writing backstage.  Call me a coward or a cynic, but I don’t want to be 40 with nothing to hang my literary hat on besides some short stories my parents think are great and a blog that occasionally random people read.  There needs to be something else that runs parallel to my art that makes me happy and proud (and well-fed).  For now, that’s teaching and making time to write when I can.  In a few years, I may try to turn some tables, but for now this makes sense to me.  At 24, developing myriad passions gives me room to think, combine and create.  The challenge now is flexing the teaching quads while keeping the writing biceps toned should I want to bust ‘em out.  Hard, but not impossible.

When I Dip, You Dip, We Dip

Last night, when I was struggling to fall asleep and writing this blog post in my brain, I was planning to start off by noting (bemoaning, even) the elevated percentage of weirdos in New York City. But in the sober morning, that’s not exactly what I want to get at.  More accurately, there’s an elevated percentage of extreme people in the city—many of whom are not exactly weirdos—and it’s those extremeos that make this city great.  Being a happy New Yorker depends on embracing the extremeos and, if you want to get self-analytical, maybe even admitting that you’re a little extreme yourself. And just maybe that’s why you keep renewing your lease rather than moving somewhere more moderate.   

  

Living here, you start to develop an immunity to all types of people, along with all types of germs. Though still as judgmental as ever, I find myself a bit more accepting—willing to shrug things off and engage the extreme.  Last weekend, I sat listening to a woman scream about her crack pipe on the G train, waiting a full 20 minutes before thinking to switch cars.  This morning, when a surprise rain storm hit on my way to Williamsburg, I graciously accepted the offer to share the umbrella of a short Indian man wearing a suit and green Crocs.  And while I declined his subsequent offer to get dinner, I appreciated the gesture.   I’m reading Just Kids by Patti Smith, who struck up a conversation with future lover Robert Mapplethorpe on the Lower East Side, going against her suburban mother’s familiar refrain to never talk to strangers.  These things pay off (or, they don’t, and things get really bad).  

Apartment buildings in NYC are microcosmic of the city at large: you happily inhabit your space, trying your best to ignore the goings-on of those who live in similar quarters above, below or adjacent.  I have an airy, Texas-sized  apartment two blocks from Trader Joe’s, so  I happily ignore the downpour of less-ideal things going on around me.  As of late, though, my building is getting more extreme, and I’m not sure whether to ignore, embrace or make waves. 

The building and the hardware store underneath are owned by Steve, a sweaty Irish bruiser who, if he were better looking, would fit right into The Departed. Steve is an elusive landlord who does little by way of building maintenance (read: the stairs are filthy and he won’t let me on the roof), but really I can’t complain.  The apartment building has four units, one on each floor. The one directly above ours is inhabited by three boys about our age who work in sports in Manhattan.  Though not the boyfriend material I was hoping  for (convenience factor!), their only real offense is that they have a basketball hoop in their kitchen that can be loud at teacher bedtime.  Strangely, they also have five TV’s, but that really only offends my energy-consciousness.  Again, I can’t complain. 

But the bottom floor and the top floor are getting extreme.  As I was walking up the steps a few months ago, a woman with dark bangs crowding a shrewd face popped her head out of the first floor apartment, looked around suspiciously and beckoned to me.  We’d never spoken before. 

“Is everything okay?”

She rolled her eyes and shared—roughly—the following: 

“I just want to tell you girls: The man on the top floor is a maniac. He’s sick.  We’ve been feuding for years, and I’m trying to get him evicted.”  

Huh. This is less easy to ignore. This, I think, qualifies as extreme. Until now, the only things I’d really noticed about the top floor apartment was the cigarette smoke floating through the air shaft and the loud Spanglish screaming occurring at odd times of day.  

“Um, what do you mean?”

“He never lets his mother out of the apartment.  He leaves piles of rotten food on my doorstep.  And, have you noticed the napkins on the steps?”

I thought about it; I had seen some occasional napkins, but chocked it up to normal trash.  “Well…I guess I have…” 

“I put those there to cover up his piles of spit.”

“Excuse me?”

“He uses chewing tobacco, dip, and spits in the hallways to piss me off. So I keep napkins ready to cover it up—as a warning to other people. I want him to know I know, but I don’t wanna clean it up.”

That makes sense, I GUESS.

I didn’t really know what to say back. This news both is and isn’t a big deal.  I asked if she thought we were in any real danger and she responded with a vehement no.  I thanked her for the disclosure, went upstairs and relayed it as best I could to my roommates.  We agreed it was weird, disgusting and extreme but, what could we really do?  Clearly she’d already complained to Steveo and the situation didn’t warrant doing the worst thing about New York City: searching for a new apartment. 

Months passed, and I was reminded of this conversation only when I saw the tell-tale napkins bearing warnings of spit below and alerting me that things in my building were far left of normal.  

As I was walking up the steps last week, though, I saw the following sign, taped up in glaring red tape:

Grammatical errors aside, that is extreme.

Good Reads

Taking a break from young adult literature, I ventured back into the adult realm over the summer and remembered why I teach reading: because I really like reading books. Duh. 

As a reading teacher, it’s easy to get caught up in leveled assessments, vocabulary trackers, test scores and homework (in)completion.  Devouring a lot of amazing, thought-provoking books on my own was a welcome respite (hearkening back to the selfish English major years) and reminder that it’s important to take a step back from all that and teach kids why we really read: because reading is fucking awesome. Only with fewer expletives. 

With that mind, here’s some of the good stuff I read this summer:

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan: This genre-defying work spans the lives of an interconnected cast of characters brought together by themes of music and time (“time is just a goon”).  The book includes a 60-page PowerPoint presentation created by a young girl living in the California desert, a sexy African safari, a sci-fi look at New York City in a decade and a public-relations-motivated journey to an anonymous former Soviet country.  Egan is known for creating subtle characters that leave a major impression, and she lives up to that reputation in her latest book.  She takes a risk and allows those characters—typically quarantined in San Francisco—to travel the word and meet up with each other in ways that are smart and never contrived. 

Solar by Ian McKewan:  In his most recent novel, McKewan accomplishes something rare: a comedy about climate change.  Though an inherently serious topic, McKewan tackles global warming through the eyes of his pathetically hilarious protagonist—a pudgy Nobel-Prize winning physicist who’s been married five times over and has a serious weakness for potato chips.  The novel is meticulously researched—but never pretentious—and confronts something we’re all thinking about through a witty character study.  In my mind, nothing can live up to Atonement, but this book is a unique take on something important that also happens to be pretty damn funny.   

Other People We Married, by Emma Straub: I met Emma Straub in the Brooklyn Bookcourt in July and she gave me some pretty great advice about writing.  In return, I bought and read her elegant collection of short stories. Now, I stalk her at Trader Joe’s—just kidding. The stories are character and relationship-driven and involve people who are all a little bit unsure of what it is, exactly, that they’re looking for.  The stories involve missing cats, attractive graduate students and dissimilar sisters.  Like many of the greats, Straub makes ordinary things unordinary things with precise, graceful prose.

How Did You Get This Number? by Sloane Crosley: For a while now, Sloane Crosley has been my hero.  There are many women in their twenties who live in New York City and write cynically about their existence, but very few do it well; Crosley nails it. Her writing has a simple lyricism that pervades her self-deprecating, cynical outlook and makes her stand out in a saturated genre as someone you seriously might want to get to know.  Crosley finds truth and humor in the everyday and reminds readers that we’re all in this crazy city together, just trying to date normal people, live with normal roommates and take normal vacations.  Somehow, I relate.

Shadow Tag, by Louise Erdrich:  Louise Erdrich is my favorite writer and, like my friend Jason told me a few months ago, you get double lit points for reading a Native American Woman (doubly disadvantaged and not afraid to write about it).  The novel follows the passionate romance of an artistic couple trying to raise children in Minnesota post 9-11.  Though the book does not take place on an Indian reservation like most of her work, Erdrich infuses her most contemporary novel with her signature mysticism.  Shadow Tag is relentlessly dark and really pretty twisted, but if you’re in the mood, by all means…

Lit, by Mary Karr:  If good memoir depends on good pain, Mary Karr is absolutely deserving of the three memoirs she’s written.  Lit is the follow up to her first memoir (The Liar’s Club) and chronicles her mostly unhappy life from college to the present day.  She confronts herself through the diverse roles she plays: writer, reader, mother, lover, alcoholic and finally spiritualist. To take the easy way out is to simply promise that Karr’s writing is evocative in a way that defies description and just asks to be read (in fact, most sentences deserve to be read twice).  Her memoir is about how we deal with the undealable, how we confront the unconfrontable.  Karr tackles her pain and shares her story with the unique grace of a literary Texan.  Seriously, read this book. 

While I would lose my job if I recommended any of these books to my students, the point is that I love reading and happen to have 75 incoming kids who will be forced to stare at my face and listen to me speak for an hour every day come September. Power trip. There are many things I need to accomplish next year, but if I keep sight of reading-lust, I have a feeling things might work out pretty well. 

Vocab Gapping

I was born into words, and I’m way into them back. I like they way they sound alone and the way they work together, forming rich thoughts from pretty little things. Bring on roots and Latin, diphthongs, adverbs and cognates. I like learning new words and using them—being pretentious in good company—letting them slide from my tonsils to my tongue, flipping into the air. A well-developed male vocabulary gets me going while caveman semantics stop me short. There is a direct correlation between vocabulary and sex appeal; apparently, there’s also a direct correlation between vocabulary and success in school, college and beyond. As summer fades and year two of teaching looms, it’s probably time to think about the latter more than the former.

If you’re at all plugged in, you’ve heard of the achievement gap: white kids are more successful than black kids, rich than poor, zip codes are numeric determinants of success, etc. The achievement gap is a lot more nuanced, though, than mainstream media gives it credit. My school got its state test scores back this week, and we’re feeling pretty damn good. 100% of our seventh and eight graders scored proficient or advanced on the math exam, outperforming Brooklyn students by a scary margin and keeping pace with white students across the state. Take that, achievement gap: You can close yourself right up.

Except not quite.

The data isn’t nearly so tidy where English/Language Arts is concerned. Though twice as many of my seventh graders scored proficient than did Brooklyn seventh graders at large, the scores are a far cry from 100%. Breakdown: math gives us bragging/drinking rights, but there’s still a gaping gap in more literary pursuits. 

Why is it that inner city kids can lap white kids in fractions and division but still trail far behind in reading and writing? There are lots of theories, but I find one particularly compelling: the vocabulary gap. Studies show that by the time a disadvantaged, inner city kid enters elementary school, she knows something like 10,000 fewer words than her wealthy white counterpart. If nothing is done to counteract these numbers, the cavern widens until we’re talking Grand Canyon. This is absolutely staggering. 

I spent all day at a conference in Tarrytown learning sexy new strategies for teaching reading. If you've seen it, picture a nerdier version of the movie "Cedar Rapids." Part of the day was devoted to vocabulary instruction. According to some mathematical process (no one’s strength in the room), close to 20% of our instructional time as reading teachers should be devoted to word study. We started the session by reading a chapter from Animal Farm and identifying the words with which our students would struggle. Overall comprehension of the text relies on these words, and the list was close to 30. Do you teach these words before the reading or during? Do you skip over some and focus on others? In the vocabulary hierarchy, which words are tops? If you pause to explicitly teach every difficult word, you’re losing out on Socialist allegories and narrative tone, but without the words, are those things even possible? For a teacher, the task at hand is daunting; for a student who’s been vocabulary gapped, the task is near-impossible. But if we give up, it gets worse.

So every day I teach words: skeptical, cynical, eloquence, benevolence. We study roots and parts of speech, we practice in pairs and on our own; there are review sessions and vocabulary quizzes. But we’re talking thousands and thousands, and as my students spit new vocab, so too do the white kids who've already gapped them. Losing battle? Maybe.

We can never make up thousands, but we can teach kids that knowing words is worth the trouble. That they can use context to find meaning and dictionaries when that falls short. We can teach kids that words are meant to be known and savored. Word up.

Desert Naptime

After an eleven-hour flight during which I subsisted on hummus and Tylenol PM, I arrived in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport alongside 40 of my new Jewish best friends. Used to no more than one or two Jewish friends, I was overwhelmed; in curls and sweats, we looked dazed and vaguely related. As we climbed onto the tour bus—cramped home base for the next ten days—our guide greeted us in adorably accented English:

“Hello, Chosen People!”

And, just like that, the tone was set.

Twenty minutes passed, and we approached a low-slung gray building monitored lackadaisically by a guard with a dangling cigarette and a handgun tucked into cargo pants. Normal, I soon realized, for this country whose width is occasionally less than a half-marathon.

As the bus parked outside the building, the Jew sitting next to me asked in a hushed tone, “Have you ever seen Locked up Abroad?”

No, I had not had the viewing pleasure, but the implication was clear even without the context.

We stopped there for breakfast.

***

Good travel and good writing are both about small moments, a correlation that somehow does not make good travel writing easy. It’s hard to distill a massive experience into moments—to find the digestible micro in the vast macro. Oftentimes, you end up speaking less about a huge trip than you do about the banalities of everyday life. Those who have had the pleasure know there’s something inexpressible about travel.

When asked about a trip, we speak in broad terms because people don’t have time for more and we lack the vocabulary to describe the moments that makes travel addicting. Keeping that in mind, it’s useful to develop a sound bite, something thematic or summative that satisfies the questioner and saves you from rambling with no conclusion.

“How was the Dominican Republic?”

“Wonderful! I got a chance to see rural parts of the country and also gorgeous tropical beaches. It was eye-opening to see that kind of poverty, but also super relaxing to just chill on the beach.” 

Done. Everyone’s happy. Now, where should we get dinner?

Somehow, though, I can’t craft a cohesive sound bite for my trip to Israel. The trip’s takeaways are as disorderly as my classroom, a jumbled mess inside my brain. I suspect this is a good thing on a personal level—something like growth or process—but it makes articulation near impossible.

Birthright was unique in that there were expectations greater than fun or new experiences, though those were certainly included. In exchange for a free trip to the Land of Milk and Honey, Birthright expects a great deal from its participants, which seems like a fair exchange. By the end of the ten-day trip, you should:

1. Feel a strong connection to your Jewish roots, even if you were raised with little conception of Judaism.

2. Support the existence of the state of Israel. Make its enemies your enemies.

3. Have 40 new Jewish best friends with whom you can do things like celebrate Shabbat every Friday night.

4. Have a conception of your own spirituality.

5. Know enough about Israeli politics, history, economy and religion that you can serve as an ambassador to the uneducated among us.

6. Rethink any preconceived notions you might have about Judaism and Israel.

7. Stay healthy and energetic as you traverse cities, beaches and deserts on little more than four hours of sleep

No big deal.

The list is an exaggeration, but the point is that Birthright is more significant than most of the trips I’ve taken. This is not to say I chugged the Kool-Aid (I have no bearded husband and I plan to keep on strutting my knees and elbows), but it definitely got me thinking while bouncing in the Dead Sea.

***

After a starry desert campout, I woke up in a red-wine-induced haze (in New York, I’d call it a nasty hangover, but this is the Holy Land) and tried to put my sandy contacts back into my half-shut eyes with the tips of sandy fingers. To put it mildly, I was not in a good mood. The sun was blazing fiercely and the prospect of wandering though the desert—“hiking”—was not particularly pleasant, whether it be 40 minutes or 40 years. Preparing myself for the unavoidable, I slapped on deodorant and sneakers, peed behind a shrub and sipped Nescafe. Ain’t no Stumptown in the Negev.

About halfway through the hike, we stopped in a shaded area formed by high, flat rocks and sandy hills forever. Our guide instructed us to each find a flat rock for a pillow and a spot to stretch out. He instructed us to be totally silent. Like a lizard, I spread my sleepy body on a hot rock and stretched my fingers above my head. As we settled into our areas—silently, peacefully—our guide started leading us in meditation; he was very in touch with Judaism’s spiritual side. Asking us to breathe deeply, letting our breath slowly wash over our organs, to think about where we were, its significance to our spirituality and to our people. My cynical reflex started to flare up, but I held it in, focusing instead on the fact that I suddenly felt amazing: hot cancer rays streaming across my body, new friends breathing nearby and the eerie quiet that only the desert provides. As I drifted off into what will go down as the best nap ever, the cynic in me floated up, and I realized that maybe these are things with which I could get down.