Saturday night

 Yesterday went OK. I dropped off things at the post office, deposited my check at the bank, got things at Whole Foods and Nijiya, and got back here and settled in for a nice Shabbat dinner. 

I'd bought a half-size bottle of wine at Whole Foods and the stuff tasted more like vinegar than anything else. Plus I bought a 4-pack of cans of beer at Nijiya, the drinking of which after the wine caused me to go to sleep early and thus get up early which was kind of the plan. Awful way to reset my sleep schedule, though. 

It's supposed to rain tomorrow but I'm still going to try to make it to the 10AM class OK. If nothing else I can ride my bike up to the light rail and take that to Diridon, then it's a relatively short ride to the temple. 

Today I watched a documentary about Herb Alpert that was only made a year or two ago. It was pretty good. While no one considers Alpert to be a virtuoso trumpeter, the fact that he started playing at 8, had teachers, was in high school, college, and Army bands, and that pretty much all he ever did for a living was play trumpet, says that while not a flashy player, there's a lot of depth there. One could do worse than to get to play as well as him. 

I've been thinking lately about how, to understand American culture, you just have to watch American TV. For instance, every time the subject comes up on Reddit, there are tons of Americans saying Oh no, not them, they don't wear shoes in the house, only very dirty people do that! But if you look at our TV programming, shoes in the house are the norm. The only places in American homes where shoes are not normally worn are in the bath/shower or in bed. Elsewhere, it's shoes 99.99% of the time. 

Another social norm that's enforced is the law of "Fuck You, I've Got Mine". In The Beverly Hillbillies, the characters are suddenly rich because oil was discovered on their land. The immediate, unquestioned, reaction is to pack their shit and leave, and get far, far away from any friends, family, church, any connections from what are suddenly their enemies; poor people. You never see or hear about relatives they're helping out, or their giving to charities, or anything like that. 

In fact, in all of TV-land, giving to charities, such a big thing in Judaism, is never seen. It'd be kind of normal to show admirable characters giving to charities and bad guys / cads not, but charitable behavior is just not seen at all. You have to go to old movies from the 1930s or earlier to see charitable behavior. Post WWII, any kind of altruism at all, I guess, is seen as "Communism".