Today I spent way too much time flirting with Typo. Typo is a blogging system based on Rails. Rails, in turn, is the Web application framework for Ruby that's been making Web developers so very excited lately (and with good reason). Ruby is the only programming language that's been able to tempt me away from Python ever since I first discovered Python's incredible sleekness in my senior-level algorithms course at university.

But I digress. Why am I still playing with blog programs when I so recently reiterated my satisfaction with PyBlosxom? The first reason is features. It would be very nice to be able to search within the posted entries, to place entries in multiple categories at once, and to split entries so that only the first lead-in paragraph is initially shown on the front page, thus allowing more entries to fit comfortably on a single page. I could probably get these features through PyBlosxom by hunting down some plug-ins written by other people or by writing them myself, but since I always strive to embody the virtue of laziness, I'm not going to do that if I can get what I want for free (more or less) by switching to a different program.

A somewhat more important reason to play with Typo is to grab some nice juicy experience points with the technologies involved. As enlightening as it may be to read about things like Ruby and Rails and Sqlite, I'll never really get the hang of them without actually finding an excuse to use them, no matter how poignant my reading material may be.

I'm still not sure whether I'll actually switch to Typo. I'm not pleased with how much I had to fight to get it to work with Apache without being given an entire DocumentRoot to take over all for itself. This is not actually hard to do once you learn how to do it; rather, this counts as a failure of the documentation for Typo (where the relevant information is obscured by poor organization) and the documentation for Rails (where the information is incomplete, occasionally incorrect, and organized erratically). On the other hand, when it's set up and working well, Typo is quite pleasant to work with. The question may hinge upon whether I can successfully shoehorn Typo into managing all the content on my site, which would be an easy and clean way to maintain a consistent appearance across all pages. Typo does have built-in support for managing static HTML pages, but it doesn't seem to have any ready-made facility for indexing and serving up non-HTML files, so I'd have to pull a minor magic trick or two before letting Typo take over everything.

Of course, if I'm really serious about using a content manager for my Web site, then I'd have to think a little harder about the bigger players in that arena, like Textpattern, Wordpress, and Movable Type. But that's something for another day.

Over Sukkos, I read A Separate Peace by John Knowles. This was a book I'd been assigned to read back in ninth grade, but the homoerotic undercurrents of the story freaked me out so much at the time that I couldn't properly concentrate on it very well and so I faked my way through most of the schoolwork that was assigned with the novel. Of course, I was all the more freaked out because it seemed like I was the only one seeing that sort of theme, and so part of me assumed I was just being gutter-minded and reading stuff into the book that wasn't there. Now that I've been around the block a few more times, I'd since discovered that it wasn't just my wild imagination at work, and so I was happy to take a second, fresh look at this marvelously well-written book.

Without question, there's absolutely not even the smallest explicit mention actual homosexual activity or fantasy in the story. But equally without question is the intensity of Gene's feelings toward Finny, and not just platonic feelings of admiration. The eloquent imagery of Gene's narration whenever describing Finny's exquisite physicality is probably the closest the book gets to an explicit illustration of the nature of Gene's love for Finny. There are also a couple of very sly, teasing, on-the-side references to gayness, the most striking of which is Finny's hilariously pink shirt. Gene declares to Finny with open shock that it makes him "look like a fairy!" And Finny responds with perfectly unflustered aplomb at that idea, idly wondering what would happen if he "looked like a fairy to everyone." While the greater point being made is Finny's lovable irrepressibility, I can't help but feel like the author is toying with the reader with such allusions. It think it's just delightfully droll.

But while the hints of homosexuality in the novel may range from scandalous to amusing in the reader's mind, it wouldn't be all that important to the book's deeper meaning if it weren't for the insight it lends us into Gene's psychology. The central difficulty in understanding A Separate Peace is Gene's motivation for surreptitiously causing the accident that crippled Finny. The rest of the story after that flows pretty clearly and comprehensibly, with Gene progressing through various stages of attempting to atone for this climactic action. But the reason for Gene's action is far from clear. On my first reading, I found this point to be the most puzzling mystery of the story. A significant part of Gene's own inner torment is caused by his own inability to understand what motivated him to commit such a deed. The best that he can come up with is that it was "just some ignorance inside me, some crazy thing inside me, something blind, that's all it was." While I wouldn't disagree with the irrational nature of Gene's motive, I think a closer look at the events and emotions leading up to the accident can paint a much more detailed and useful picture of why Gene shook Finny out of the tree.

So let's review what was going on right before Finny's accident: one morning, Gene managed to cook up the theory that Finny was jealous of Gene's academic ability and was therefore secretly sabotaging Gene's studies with Finny's adventurous and rule-flouting hijinks under the guise of their close friendship. The hatred that Gene secretly nursed in response to this imagined enmity lasted for several weeks before Gene's delusion was shattered. Immediately after this sudden realization of Finny's purity of heart, that Gene committed his fateful act of betrayal. But this only deepens the conundrum. An act of violence against your best friend is only more incomprehensible when you've just been reconciled with him.

We'll have to probe even further back before the knot will begin to unravel. After all, why would Gene make the foolish mistake of suspecting his best friend of sabotage in the first place? Everything we were ever given to know of Finny's character only spoke of sportsmanship, integrity, and faithful, innocent, freely-given love. And why does the loss of this jealous suspicion cast Gene down into such a confused state of emotional turmoil? To find an answer we'll have to explore what took place immediately before Gene invented this paranoid fantasy: the trip to the beach. The day on which Finny cheerfully persuaded Gene to spontaneously cut classes for a bike ride to the seashore resulted in the experience which embodied the highest and deepest expression of their friendship that was ever realized. Lying next to each other on the sand before falling asleep under the stars after a very full day and night of simple boardwalk pleasures, Finny does an amazing thing: he tells Gene that he is his best friend. I can't describe Gene's reaction any better than the author does:

It was a courageous thing to say. Exposing a sincere emotion nakedly like that at the Devon School was the next thing to suicide. I should have told him then that he was my best friend and rounded off what he had said. I started to; I nearly did. But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.

It is no coincidence that Gene's inability to express his true feelings toward Finny immediately precedes Gene's neurotic jealously. The above quote makes it obvious that Gene's true emotions were not something that he could not face consciously. His psyche reacted by attempting to reverse the forbidden love into hatred. But this defense mechanism ultimately could not survive long against Finny's undeniable goodness. And now we can finally see a clear path to Gene's unconscious motivation for shaking Finny out of the tree: when left with no other choice, the only way that Gene could deal with a love that he could not express was to attempt to destroy the object of that love.

What separates this story from a mere tragedy of love gone awry is the symbolism of the character of Finny. The insurmountable problem that Finny represents to Gene is not just a love that is forbidden by deep cultural taboo, but the problem of a love that is too beautiful, too good, too pure, too perfect to exist in the "real" world, a world of adulthood, a world of war, deprivation, senseless cruelty. A Separate Peace forces the reader to ask the question, "What can we possibly do when we re convinced that the very structure of the entire world denies with almost the inevitibility of logic that which is truly precious and dear?" Finny was a Peter Pan whose Never-Never-Land was crumbling beneath his feet. Only Gene perceived this impending doom of adulthood, and this perception ultimately drove his every action in the story.

The final, aching question that the novel leaves undecisively answered is whether Gene actually managed to save any of the preciousness that Finny represented. Did Finny ever transcend the dull, grey, inhumanity which the war exemplified? Did Finny attain salvation despite his tragic death, or perhaps even because of it?

Last night, we surprised Seth with a birthday party at his apartment. Rachel invited a bunch of Seth's friends, and Becca and I made our own separate journeys from Tzfat. Rebecca and Avraham and Ashira simply drove in yesterday evening, and arrived early enough to help out with decorations while Rachel distracted Seth by taking him out to dinner. I took a less direct route to Jerusalem since travelling for three hours on Wednesday would conflict with my work schedule. So I left Tzfat on Tuesday night and arrived in Tel Aviv where I could crash with Itai and do all my Wednesday work shifts and still have time to get to Jerusalem in time for the party.

When I got to Tel Aviv, Itai and I went out and wandered around until we found an Asian restaurant at which to eat dinner. He also took the opportunity to show me some of his favorite sites around town, including a French bookstore and a many-colored fountain designed by the Israeli artist Agam which showed different patterns depending on which angle you viewed it. On Wednesday, I bunched together some of my shifts to make a block of time in which Itai could take me out to visit the old port city of Jaffa (a.k.a. Yaffo, a.k.a. Yaffa) which is attached to Tel Aviv. The weather was clear and balmy and perfect for an outing. After the bus dropped us off, we stopped at a mini-market to pick up picnic food, and Itai led me past various churches and historic sites until we reached a beautiful park with an amazing view of the Mediterranean to the west and the Tel Aviv coastline and skyline to the north. We munched and leaned on each other and Itai lured a murder of crows around us by baiting them with bits of crackers. It was very romantic. On the way back, we passed through a colorful and chaotic shuk selling everything from plastic pinwheels to washing machines. Itai taught me some more Arabic letters while we waited for the bus back to the city center, and I can now sound out the Arabic word for "house."

In the evening, I took the bus to Jerusalem and got to Seth's in plenty of time to spring out of the shadows with his friends as he walked through the door. Becca snapped a few pictures, but I guess we'll have to wait until she posts them somewhere before I know if they were any good. It was nice to meet some more of Seth's friends and get to know them better, but I had to flee to the bedroom after a few hours when the collective blood alcohol level rose too high. Fortunately, the party cleared away before midnight and I was able to get a decent night's sleep in Seth's bedroom.

Now that it's officially Turkey Day, we're allegedly going to get cooking and make a real Thanksgiving dinner with the family together, but as usual, the starting is slow. I better go check and see if Seth's finally awake yet. Happy Thanksgiving!

On Thursday night, Itai and I travelled to Tzfat. By the time we got to my house, it was past midnight and we were both ready to go straight to bed. Between working and shopping and cooking for Shabbos, Friday went by in the blink of an eye, even though I had gotten an early start on the day. The one thing that both Itai and I noticed about Friday was how much we had both missed just having a partner in the kitchen, turning together through the dance of making Shabbos, quietly chopping or frying vegetables in harmony.

I took Itai to Friday night services at the Abuhav Synagogue, and he thought the building's rich decorations were gorgeous. We were both amused by the swallows that had somehow gotten inside and soared and fluttered beneath the shul's vaulted ceilings. Dinner was at Avraham and Rebecca's. Since Becca felt that she might be coming down with something, she just made a simple but delicious meal of black bean soup, and Itai and I were the only guests. In the morning, Itai's stomach was bothering him, so I went to shul alone, but he was feeling better when I returned. We went out for a walk to the old (mostly ruined) fortress at the peak of the hill that Tzfat is built upon while we waited for the food to warm up. When we got home, the two of us feasted upon rice pilaf with mushrooms, cashews, and pistachios. The meal was followed by a timely afternoon nap, and then we went to Abuhav again for mincha, before wandering back to the Loewenthals to catch Third Meal and Havdalah. This time, there were lots of guests over, and Becca looked like she was feeling better. After Shabbos, we took a short tour of Avraham's gallery with a few of the guests who were visiting from the States. The rest of the evening I spent at home with Itai, and he gave me my very first guitar lesson with a guitar that I borrowed from Rebecca.

The crowning experience of the weekend was breakfast after shacharis on Sunday morning. I made french toast from the challah that was left over from Shabbos while Itai entertained me with plucking on the guitar and telling me stories from when he was alternately a teacher and student at college in Portland. As we sat and ate the toast with jam and tea, we gazed at the rain clouds outside my kitchen window and continued sharing stories. It couldn't have been a lovelier scene.

As the hour crept toward noon, Itai packed up to go home to Tel Aviv. I reluctantly sent him off, but only after equipping him with my copy of Wrestling With God and Men by Rabbi Steven Greenberg and also with what is probably my favorite non-fiction book ever, Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter.

I can really feel my relationship with Itai starting to gel. Simply spending time together just seems more and more natural. He makes me feel like I can be myself around him in a way that I've never felt around anyone else. It's just a bonus that he can teach me so much about music and language, the two loves of my life that have been least developed so far.

Last night, I made a trip to Tel Aviv to spend today with Itai. I took the 6:35pm bus from Tzfat to Akko (a.k.a. "Acre" to you Anglophonic archeology academics), and took the train from Akko to Tel Aviv. This was my first time travelling by train in Israel, and I must say that it is a very pleasant change of pace from bus travel: smoother ride, more comfortable seats with a table in front of you, more space, and shorter transit time. My only complaints were that they had the air conditioning on so high that I had to wear my coat with the hood up and that they had the inside car lights on so bright that I couldn't see the scenery through the windows.

Itai met up with me at the train station at 10, and he showed me the way to his apartment, which is but a five minute walk from the station. I got to meet Itai's roommate Yossi, Yossi's lovely husky dog Sky, and two of Yossi's teenaged sons, on one of their regular visits from their mother's home. After dropping off my bag, we went out to find a falafel stand for a light dinner. Then we went back home and watched an episode of Wonderfalls and roundly cursed the Fox television network yet again for cancelling such an intelligent and funny show before it hardly even had a chance.

Then, since we both had to get up in the morning, we tried to go to sleep right away, but instead wound up talking till sometime well past 4am. Amazingly enough, I still managed to get up for my 7am shift of work, and we got Itai out of the house in time for his 10am class in historiography. I took the liberty of spending the rest of the morning catching up on lost sleep. I woke up to notice that Itai had left me a note about the food in the fridge, so now I'm waiting for him to come back from school by munching crackers, listening to his Neshama Carlebach CD, and admiring the flowers that he still has saved from our first date.

Since I'm not working again till 3, we might spend the free time strolling to the beach or maybe by watching some more video. Who knows? After I'm done work this evening, we'll head up to Tzfat to get ready for Shabbos at my house. I'm having such a sweet time.