Done!

I had my first midterm today.  It was pretty easy.  It also brought me back to a situation I’ve been in a lot when it comes to test-taking.

I not only test well, which seems to be pretty common among my internet acquaintances, but I also test fast.  I’m almost always the first person done with a test, sometimes by a considerable margin.  Since I’m also shy and self-conscious, this usually means I end up sitting there with my completed test until someone else finishes and hands theirs in, which tends to embolden me to turn mine in too and get the hell out of the room.  Today I finished the test, which had a three-hour period set aside for it, in about an hour, and then waited about half an hour until a couple other people had turned theirs in before I turned in mine.  My roommate, who is also in the class, later told me that most of the remaining people turned theirs in shortly afterward, so I may not have been the only person doing this.

I do tend to get good grades on these tests, but even when I don’t do particularly well I finish quickly (sometimes I just don’t know the answer to a question, and there’s no use agonizing over it).  I often wonder, though, just what all the other people in these tests are doing for so long.  Am I really that unusual in finishing so quickly?  I emphasize that it’s not that I’m particularly well-prepared or anything.  This seems to happen regardless of how well I’ve studied or how well  I know the material.

Times Change

Matt Yglesias has an interesting post on Israel where he discusses how his own Zionist consciousness was formed in the “Oslo era” of the nineties, when Israeli politics was dominated by secular social democrats earnestly engaged in the peace process and secular liberal American Jews strongly supported them.  I’m a little younger than Matt, but my own understanding of the situation developed at around the same time under similar circumstances.  In retrospect, it turned out to be something of a dead-end and even an aberration in the course of the long and tragic history of Israeli-Palestinian relationship, but at the time there was a real feeling of hope and a sense that the violence and nationalism of the past was drawing to a close.  After being introduced to the issue in that frame, the subsequent total collapse of the peace process into chaotic violence and extremism was a really crushing blow, and I think it really left the American Jewish left feeling lost about what to do.  Personally I’ve gone a bit further down the road of rejecting Zionism entirely than most others in my camp, but even people like my mom, who remains both steadfastly Zionist and strongly opposed to the approach of the contemporary Israeli right, seem very dispirited about the way things have gone and unsure about whether or how they can be set right.

I think this is the best context in which to understand what J Street represents and who it is speaking for.  There are a lot of people out there who really want to return to where we were fifteen years ago, and while both American and Israeli politics have shifted in a way that makes that not quite possible at this point, there have been some faint glimmers of hope recently that make an organization explicitly advocating an anti-AIPAC, anti-Likud, pro-peace agenda really attractive to a big segment of the American Jewish population.

Registered

I just called the New Jersey voter registration hotline to check if the registration application I mailed in went through, and it turns out it did.  It’s just taking a while to process them this time of year because there’s an election coming up.  So that’s good.

Bicycles For All

This discussion of bicycling in Denmark is interesting, and it reminds me of a similar dynamic that I’ve encountered here in New Jersey.  In my immediate area (Highland Park and New Brunswick), distances and infrastructure are such that pretty much everything you need is easily accessible by walking, and that’s how I get around.  All those things are, however, much more quickly and easily accessible by biking, so lots of people bike.  While in many parts of the US biking is associated with a certain socioeconomic group, here, as apparently in Denmark, it’s much more widespread.  Lots of cyclists are the expected young, educated white people, mostly Rutgers students and faculty, but at least as many are Mexican immigrants of all ages, and a broad cross-section of other parts of society is also represented.  Unlike in Denmark, however, the transportation system here isn’t designed for bikes at all.  The roads are narrow and crowded, and I have yet to see one with any sort of bike lane, so people mostly bike on the sidewalk, which is also narrow and crowded.  Everything’s just on a very small scale, and while plenty of the roads are oriented toward cars, very few were designed for the amount of traffic they now get.  The traffic jams in Highland Park are absurd for such a small town.  This, however, actually makes biking even more attractive in some ways, since it means that for a great many trips biking is not only faster than walking, it’s also faster than driving.  The driving force behind all of this, however, is just the density and socioeconomic profile of the area, not any deliberate policy choices to encourage biking, which makes it sound much like the pre-1970s Danish situation.  Obviously rather few places in the US are like this, so the general implications are probably fairly limited, but it’s interesting to see the dynamics in action.

One Down

Well, I finally got through to PSE&G to ask why I never got any sort of follow-up after signing up on their website.  I’ve tried to call several times but always ended up getting put on hold forever, so I figured I’d have a better chance if I called late at night.  It worked, but I was still put on hold for five minutes before I got to speak with someone.  Makes me wonder how many people are calling the electric company at 1:00 am on a Sunday, but whatever.  The guy was very helpful and confirmed that my name was on the account, although he didn’t have any explanation for why I hadn’t heard anything or gotten any bills.  He said the September bill had been generated, and that he would send me a duplicate copy since I don’t seem to have received it.  So here’s hoping it comes.

Assuming it does, that takes care of the most crucial of my various problems settling in.  Now I just need to tackle voter registration and health insurance.

Update: Turns out Aetna has a convenient online form for submitting questions to customer service, and “request insurance card” is one of the predefined categories.  So I’ve taken care of that one too.

Why I Hate Insurance Companies

My mom has a very good insurance plan through Blue Cross.  One of the ways in which it’s very good is that it provides coverage for her children until the end of the month in which they turn 25.  For me, of course, that means that I’m still covered today but won’t be tomorrow.  Knowing this, I went ahead and signed up for the insurance plan offered to Rutgers students through Aetna, which I’m sure isn’t as good as my mom’s but isn’t very expensive and includes a prescription drug benefit, which is the main thing I need.  I paid my premium at the beginning of the semester, and they were supposed to send me an insurance card, but I haven’t gotten one yet.  Since I don’t think there’s any way for me to get prescriptions covered by Aetna without the card, and, annoyingly, I also can’t sign up for the customer service website without a membership number, which I won’t have until I get the card, I decided to go ahead and get a prescription, which will run out soon but not immediately, refilled before the end of the month.

I sent in the refill request via the Walgreens website two days ago and was going to pick it up yesterday, but I forgot to go over there (it’s kind of out of my way).  So I went by today to pick it up, only to learn that they didn’t have any record of it and I had to request it again and wait an hour for it to be filled.  I went and got something to eat, then came back an hour later to pick up the prescription.  Unfortunately, at that point the pharmacist told me that it was too soon since I had last had the prescription refilled for the insurance company (presumably Blue Cross) to pay for it, and that they wouldn’t pay for it until tomorrow.  She offered to put it in overnight and have it ready first thing in the morning, and I said that was fine, but I don’t know if it’s worth bothering since tomorrow I won’t have the Blue Cross insurance at all.  I guess I’ll go over to Walgreens and see, and maybe try to figure out where the hell my Aetna card is so I can get them to pay for it, but if insurance doesn’t cover it there’s no way I can afford this medicine.

In conclusion, the American healthcare system sucks.

Birthday

25.  Not much to say about it really, but I figured I should put up a post to mark it.

Oh, For Hell’s Sake

It’s been over a month since I signed up online for the utilities to be transfered to my name, and weeks since I mailed in my voter registration form.  Nevertheless, neither seems to have gone through.  I guess I’m going to have to call the electric company’s customer service number tomorrow.  I don’t know what the best thing to do about the voter registration thing is, but I’ll probably just fill it out and send it in again.  This stuff isn’t a huge deal, but it’s important for establishing residency, both in and of itself and because I need the documentation before getting a driver’s license and opening a bank account.

More generally, I feel like I’m not settling in very easily so far.  School has been great, but outside of the classroom I don’t really feel like I belong anywhere except at home, and while I’ve been trying to do things like get a job and such, I seem to be basically on my own for everything and given my general shyness and lack of motivation that means I haven’t gotten much done.

Also, I’m hungry.  Damn religion.

A Rabbi Walks Into A Ghost Town…

As many of my few readers know, this year I didn’t go to Rosh Hashanah services for the first time in my entire life.  I had a lot of reasons for that decision, and I think it was the right one.  My relationship with Judaism has become increasingly strained and complicated lately, and this is a good time to take a bit of a break from organized religion and see how it feels.

That said, I haven’t abandoned Judaism entirely, and while I won’t go to services on Yom Kippur, I will fast.  Most people I’ve talked to about this haven’t seemed to understand why I would do that, but I feel like it’s important to maintain some connection to Judaism, which I still see as a major part of my heritage and a deep well of meaningful tradition that has a lot of potential for addressing problems in the future.

This post, which speaks to me on many levels, is a great example of that potential, which is still there even if it isn’t being fully realized right now.  It’s one of the most inspiring things I’ve read in a long time, and I’d recommend it to anyone of any religious background or lack thereof.

And on that note, L’Shanah Tovah to all my readers, Jewish or not.  May it be a worthwhile year, no matter how challenging or difficult it becomes.

There’s A Pleasant Surprise

Contrary to my earlier pessimism, it seems that the Israeli government has pulled their anti-intermarriage ad in response to what seems to have been a significant uproar among Diaspora Jews.  This suggests that the divide between different camps of American Jews may not be as stark or definitive as I had been thinking, and it gives some (but, I hasten to add, not really very much) hope that the tide may be starting to turn away from the recent divisiveness.  We’ll see.