Month: July 2000

Tonight I saw La vita è bella (also known as Life is Beautiful). Like most good movies, it made me think. I thought about how my culture and heritage is special to me and how I want similar things to be special to my children. I thought about all the trouble people went through over the last several millennia to not let the Jewish heritage die away.

And wouldn’t you know it, but a girl from Argentina, Jessica Landes, sends me an ICQ message when I get home, asking if it were possible that we would be related. So we talked a little, and our family histories seem to match so far. This could be interesting. Her first question was whether I was Jewish, which I am, and I countered with the question of whether she was a Levite. (A Levite is a descendant of Joseph’s brother Levi, a family which provided the second level of high priests in the Temple at Jerusalem.) She said she was. So we’re going to check into this further.

As you may know by now, there are some strange facts about me. One of these facts is that I like to collect license plates. I don’t have too much of an extensive collection, but here are the ones I do have:

The Connecticut plate was given to me a long time ago by Beth, who once lived there. I found the Georgia plate lying on the ground behind a car dealership in Florida during a spring break with my family, possibly in seventh grade. The New York plate was ours when we lived in Latham, NY. The plate was on our red Subaru station wagon. The blue New Jersey plate used to be on a car my father had, either the BMW or the Porsche. My old Toyota Celica was the owner of the yellow New Jersey plate until I finally got rid of that car last November to buy my Honda Civic. And lastly, the Pennsylvania tag was given to me by Stacey. It’s from when she was going to grad school at Carnegie Mellon University.

I went walking with Bryan and his newly-bought sneakers tonight in an attempt to begin our path to getting into shape. Eventually we will move to jogging and running. Keep your eyes open for joglog, a new weblog where we can talk about the strange things we see, or anything else we feel like.

Is it just me, or do I almost look sexy in black and white? But I must say that Melanie looks much sexier than I in black and white or in color.

Why does time seem to pass so quickly? I’m going to be old before I know it.

It frustrates me the amount of money people charge to do mediocre work. They charge something around $100 per hour to do something so carelessly… especially when I know I could do a much better job (and charge much, much less).

Ouch. $375 to fix my car today. It better be good. It better make me happy!

If you ever have a chance to see the New York Philharmonic, especially for free, you should definitely go. They were awesome. The program included Glinka’s Russlan and Ludmilla Overture, something by Arutunian, Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo by Copland, and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.

So now my boss is leaving for good at the end of the week. It should make preparing for the fall season even more interesting.

I managed neither to eat out nor to go out to a movie tonight. Sort of. I did see Waking Ned Divine (rented on video) over at Stacey‘s and Jen‘s place. It was a good movie with a seemingly original plot. Their accents were funny, too.

Now I think it is bed time. Tomorrow I’m supposed to go visit my father in Jersey City. But the New York Philharmonic concert, which was postponed because of infected mosquitoes, may be happening tomorrow night as well. So… I’ll have to see what happens.