I spent a good part of this week taking apart my entire bedroom and putting it back together again, much more organized this time. It's like I have space for my stuff again, and it's all accessible. Things were reassembled just in time, too, because Seth came up to Tzfat for Shabbos with Rachel and Jackie, and he's sleeping at my place. We're gonna have ourselves a time at Rebecca and Avraham's for the meals.

Oh, and it's hot here. Horrifyingly hot.

To celebrate Lag Ba'Omer this year, I decided to go camping near the town of Meron. Meron is just across the valley west of Tzfat, and every Lag Ba'Omer there's a tremendous pilgrimage to the grave of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, author of the Zohar, the book most central to the study of Kabbalah. The festival itself is too noisy, crowded, and chaotic for my tastes, but I'd never hiked all the way to Meron before, and I didn't want to pass up the excuse to do so. I left well after dark, and even though the moon hadn't risen yet, the starlight was quite sufficient for the walk down to the creek at the bottom of the valley. After that point, the tree canopy was thick enough to block out the stars and I had to use my flashlight for most of the rest of the trail.

I passed by a group of young Americans camped out by a wooden bridge. I also heard plenty of the wild boars pass by in the darkness, and even though I know they're harmless, I got quite a startle the first time I heard their own startled snorting as they noticed me and hustled away. At one point, I stopped to drink and rest, and all the night sounds of the forest gradually emerged: crickets and frogs chirping, boars tromping, leaves whispering, brook babbling.

When I got close enough to Meron to hear the loud music and smell the bonfire smoke of the celebration, the moon had finally risen high enough to peek over the hilltops. It was about midnight and I was too tired to bother facing the crowds in town, so I just picked a spot to set up my sleeping bag a little bit away from the trail inside the nature preserve.

After a good night's sleep, I headed into town to see the remnants of the party and to catch a bus back home. The hillsides right next to Meron were covered with the tents of other campers, and the loudspeakers were still belting out religious music. All in all, it was a fun little adventure.

Mad props to my homies back in Baltimore, Steve and Rebecca, for the great success of their production of Aristophanes' Frogs. I remember the fun of sitting in on one of the meetings of the translation team when I was visiting last January. It brings a smile to my face to see them get the recognition they deserve for all their hard work. Now I just can't wait for Steve to arrive in Israel for his archaeological dig.

I just stumbled on this really great article. Relevant excerpt:

"Then it hit me. All my gay male friends were out. Becoming close with gay men meant hearing their stories of coming out. That’s because coming out is a cathartic milestone in any out person’s life, and usually came after years of self-reproach, denial, and repression. Coming out meant finally forgiving themselves for being who they were and feeling how they felt. They tried denial, avoidance, hetero sex and guilt, then finally accepted themselves as themselves. Only when they let go of the blame and guilt could they love themselves. Despite familial and social anathema, they trusted themselves and refused to pretend to be something they were not. It was freeing to be one’s self. How simple, yet seemingly rare."

A while back, Becca and I swapped cell phones for a day just for the fun of seeing how they differed. Since it was quite plain that she loved one of the games that my phone had built in, I resolved to write an implementation of it for her that she could use without borrowing my phone. So here it is. I had a lot of fun brushing up on my JavaScript knowledge in the process.

Update 4:04 May 4, 2006: I tweaked the code to work on KHTML-based browsers like Safari and Konqueror.