I just returned from having my first ever Shabbat dinner at Danielle Lupkin's house in Los Feliz. Several of my old colleagues from the Shoah Foundation got together at her house Friday night and ate a wide variety of kosher foods...meats that had not been stored with milk, challah bread and so on. Since none of us are Orthodox, we were not too stringent on the rules. For example, we DID light the candles AFTER the sun had gone down. And, we all drove home afterwards. Driving on shabbes is a no-no.

I've always been impressed by Jewish traditions...they seem to have so much more relevance to their faith than a lot of the Christian traditions have to mine. A lot of Christian traditions and holidays have their roots in pagan and animistic rituals that were assimilated into Christianity by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. I mean, really...what do Easter eggs really have to do with the Resurrection?

As usual, gathering with the Foundation folk was great. It's funny to listen to the people who still work there complain about how bad things are. It almost makes me feel good about having been laid off. It's just not a happy place to work these days.

At any rate, today I went over to Cal State Northridge and purchased all my textbooks. It wasn't that bad, compared with some of the quarters at UCSD. I remember one quarter where I spent a total of about 700 dollars on textbooks. Yes...700 dollars for ten weeks of class. The worst part is, I think it was my senior year, so a strong case of senioritis prevented me from even opening most of them. The total for this semester came to $352.59. Not too bad for five classes.

It was sort of a nostalgic feeling to be searching through textbooks once again for the first time in six years...matching courses with books and so on and wondering why the hell I have to read that. Another thing that I had sort of forgotten about was, quite simply, the number of extremely hot women who populate college campuses. All I have to say is...damn it! Of course, now I am significantly older than most of them, but there's always the chance that there could be some hot latina in the credential program with whom I will get assigned a group project.

I still need to find some sort of part time job. It's coming down to the wire, so if anybody knows any leads, be sure to let me know.