Happy New Year, Everyone

Or: my rhythm's all off

When I said I’d start this newsletter up in the new year I did not technically specify which calendar I was adhering to, and so I greet you at the dawn of 5782 with a fresh, timely edition of the Alchemists of Memory, a newsletter that theoretically is about music, history, ecology, and various other things but in practice has been about NOBODY & NOTHING. Let’s change that.

I. New Year’s Day

I have always felt that the Gregorian New Year was impractical in its timing:

1. Too close to my birthday

2. Too close to various other, lesser winter holidays

3. Positioned oddly close to the deadest time of the (Northern Hemispherical) year, a time where little is growing and even less can be begun.

The Jewish Quasi-Lunar New Year is better — suspended sometime between the first days of September and their corresponding numbers in October, it lines up with the close of the typical harvest season (c.f. the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, which roughly aligns with Rosh Hashanah in timing and vintage). Of course, my own practice of Jewish chronology has little (but not nothing!) to do with the close of the traditional levantine harvest season. 

Instead, Rosh Hashanah has always felt like a natural beginning to the year due to its alignment with the start of the school year, which has been the strongest constant in my life over the past two decades. Every year, school would begin and just as quickly enter a sort of stasis, the normal rhythms of the Jewish day school I attended frozen by the constant start-and-stop of Rosh Hashanah into the ten days of repentance into Yom Kippur into Sukkot into Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. They couldn’t simply throw up their hands and start school in mid-October — think of our AP exam preparedness — so instead my first 13 years of organized education were characterized by a certain frantic need to catch up from the first, wasted month of the school year, the demands of secular suburban education chafing against a ritual calendar that had no idea about how hard it was to get 17 year olds to pay attention to calculus. But in turn, that first month of the school year became a sort of beautiful refuge, a nice and easy glide path out of the all-encompassing indolence of summer and into the all-encompassing frenzy of the school year. Even after I exited the world of explicitly Jewish education I lucked into a school that started at September’s end rather than August’s — most years the holidays had already come and gone by the time classes got serious.

Now that I have left formal education (for now, at least), the high holidays have become somewhat untethered from the standard rhythm of my own life — I started a new job recently, which could be shoehorned into the frame of new beginnings, but the joy of the new year has always been for me the joy of collective new beginnings, of starting (again) with many others who are also doing so.

I’m finishing this a few days after my alma mater started back up for Fall quarter and it feels bittersweet in many ways. I'm still, in many ways, deeply enmeshed in the culture of that place; many of my friends and acquaintances come from there (happily, a smaller proportion than a year ago!), and I'm still working on a research project nestled within one of its environmental science programs. I was talking earlier today with one of my collaborators on that project -- a Ph.D student not actually taking classes this quarter -- and she noted how strange it was to be moving back into the rhythm of life on campus even in the halfway-there manner she had adopted this quarter. She didn’t explain quite what she meant because I understood immediately anyway. How could I not?

When I’m not working with other people, I lose track of time. In college, I would tend towards studying in common areas, living rooms and study halls where I was only alone in passing. The main thing I got out of the experience was not the community (although that, of course, was frequently enlivening) but something more basal: the time-keeping they provided. When I am unable to build a rhythm within myself, I am driven to steal it from others, creating a cobbled-together normalcy that holds together for long enough to think properly. 

Obviously the past 18 months have not offered many chances for this kind of thing. I lived for 3 months with my family, 13 months with my partner and two extremely close friends, and nearly 2 now with my partner (and cats). In all of that I have not quite found the low hum of other people’s lives that help me focus in on what I’m doing — this is no disrespect to those who I have lived with over the course of the pandemic (I love them all), but simply a reflection that no one’s rhythm is correctly aligned right now. Even if there weren’t tangible barriers preventing us from returning to the old rhythm, it would still feel impossible to get back. Difference itself looms above us like so much stale air.

Which is, of course, why I am even more jazzed than usual about the New Year. The four-part renewal of the year is more needed than ever — the pure celebration of Rosh Hashanah into the formalized repentance of Yom Kippur into the twin harvests of Sukkot and Simchat Torah (a harvest of knowledge, but a harvest nonetheless). It’s a bit drawn out, but perhaps just the thing to reset our collective arrhythmia. 

II. Other things!

This newsletter will not always be ~1000 words of vaguely theological rambling, I promise. I’m not even sure if it will stick to this format, either! Next week, for example, expect a playlist. At some point after that, expect a map! 

While we’re here, though: here are some miscellaneous updates about things I have done and things that I think are broadly neat.

1. I have a piece in the Institute of Network Cultures’ Critical Meme Reader. It’s about the far out world of late 1980s text memes on the WELL, an early forum/online community that is still active to this day.

2. I am employed at the Long Now Foundation, where I am writing silly little tweets and blogs about some of the most important issues related to the future of human civilization :) I wrote about indigenous land practices in California and the non-ideal situation that the Spanish colonial decision to abandon them has put us in RE: everything being on fire.

3. In my last quarters at Stanford I did a variety of interesting things but the thing most shareable is this story map about where I’m from.

4. The documentary project on Asian Jews that I participated in is fundraising for a second season that will in fact include more footage of me saying occasionally profound things about ~identity~ and things of this nature.

5. As always I am writing at The Singles Jukebox. Looking back at my recent blurbs I’m most proud of what I had to say about Caroline Polachek’s “Bunny is a Rider”.

6. More later!

Bye for now! I hope this was not a waste of your time.