Open a bakery? Montreal bagels and sour dough bread.

Maybe rye with caraway.

Overheard a guy saying that he can't do something or other. I have heard him say things like that directly to me before, but from a distance it just sounded whiney. He is stuck. I know a few guys like that. I know of myself that I can be like that also. But when I want something, I do make it happen, I just have to want it bad enough. I wanted to go to Vancouver Island. I wanted to come to Israel, I wanted to go to yeshiva, I wanted to get married.

There is still a block. I am making the same mistake over and over again. I just had a job tutoring, I got a lot out of it, but I wasn't going out of my way to get feedback from the boss. On my last day I got a lot of feedback and realized that if I had just got that same feedback all along, I would have done a better job.

There is no relying on others, when you go out into this world to get your hands dirty (by building the world in a kosher way, I mean, farmers get their hands dirty), you have to make it happen. 

There is prayer and effort.

A friend of mine is starting out in real estate. He told me this morning that he made a huge mistake last night. He had been researching three hotel/apartment buildings, one is all one bedroom apartments that sell for $75,000, and another is all studio apartments that sell for on the order of $40,000. His real estate computer program found a studio apartment for $55,000. He assumed that it was in the nicer building of one bedroom apartments, and his boss got very excited about it and even put off family time to check it out, reasoning that there must have been a mistake in the listing, it was really a one bedroom and he was going to get a very good deal. Now, of course, the truth was that it was a studio apartment going for quite a bit more than market value (and the ad had said that it was a real find, indeed).


Reality. It's tough.

I find the same thing in electrical work. The customer is always right when it comes to fulfilling their needs, but when it comes to troubleshooting they are wrong, just have to assume that they are wrong, or it will just end in tears.

Facebook, stand down. Even though they are still making fun of G+, obviously, Google is taking over the world. I don't know how the Chinese fit in there to that there equation there, here. On the one hand, there is no escape, on the other hand, they have this non-threatening feel that Microsoft and Apple lack. Except for picture sharing, that's where I draw the line, for now.

Boy, oh boy, remember when I would write with pen and paper. I have blank books still waiting to be filled. Hours upon hours of work. And I say, "all I need is a laptop, and it will all be A-Okay," but I have a laptop, and it is not, and I can still whine about the amount of money needed to cover my monthly.

Kickstarter. Hasn't been aquired by Google.

Legal affairs in Israel. This country is all so heimish, everyone is so cool and brotherly, until it comes down to legal contracts, and, of course, money. Don't let my heimishkeit stand in the way of my Goyishe kop of a legal contract. A nation like all the others. The Jews are deluded, they don't really want to be a nation like all the others. Definitely not what the Neshama wants.

Obvi.

Glee. It's been a while, but there was this Valentine's Day show that focused on six couples. One, getting married, heterosexual couple, fell apart. Two gay couples, great, just fine. One handicapped couple, great. One heterosexual couple, mixed overeager and prudish. One heterosexual couple unclear and deluded. Wow, so that is how relationships are?

I could never understand, when I was in high school, or even younger, when everyone was preoccupied with sex (and I was too, just that I wasn't doing anything about it), and even later, in University, the attitude of sex without commitment, I still don't understand it, it doesn't seem natural. It could be an outgrowth of the physical side effects of birth control pills. BCPs gave the world a whole lot of Free Love, but they really do mess with a woman's hormones (that's the idea, right?). I call BCPs Female Circumcision, Western style.

The subject of how I came to be an observant Jew comes up now and then. I rarely give the true answer. The whole world is preoccupied with sex (food is also up there). But sex as an end to itself is highly unsatisfying.  Judaism, when done properly, sanctifies the mundane, including sex. There is something higher than sex. And sex even be used to connect on a higher level.

Of course intimacy is used in the world to connect on a higher level with other people, but within the structure of Torah and Mitzvos, it can be used to connect to G-dliness. And this requires further discussion, but the point here is that Judaism was the only place where I had witnessed and experienced sanctification of the mundane.