Disconnected Thoughts

I am 400 words into a 1400 word assignment, and I'm stuck. I'm at the point where I have read more in order to write more, and I keep on getting nervous about the assignment, making it difficult to focus - so I figured I'd blog instead. This counts as "productive" procrastination - right?

1. Yesterday, I was cooking with a toaster oven, unable to open tomato sauce or wine, two of my major cooking ingredients. At first I was very frustrated, but this actually forced me to be creative, and in the end it was kind of nice. I'm wondering if this is a metaphor for my life right now: working with new, unexpected ingredients, and learning how to leave out other products I might have thought of as "essential".

2. I thought of this joke: War: I came, I saw, I conquered. Sex: I saw, I conquered, I came.
It does not translate into Hebrew, and this intranslatability has been causing me to think a lot about languages and how they encode culture.

3.  I am pretty sure there was a 3, and that the entire point of my writing this post was that 3, and 1 and 2 were just side-points, but now I don't remember what 3 is  - which is how life goes and brings me back to the "different ingredients" musing. 

I am currently waiting for furniture to be delivered to my apartment, and for the chicken to be ready. And I wish I could be more productive, that somehow my focus came back - I've been finding it much more difficult, since I made aliyah, to actually do homework. I think part of that is because major life changes are accompanied by major life thoughts, which are distracting, and part of it is because I am so nervous about succeeding in a new structure, I focus on that worry instead of on the steps I actually need to take for success (which comes from God of course). This is unlike me, since I generally try to have a process-oriented, not results-oriented, approach, which fits in nicely to the Jewish concept of hishtadlut. (Basically: You try your best, God does the rest.)

Those of you who know me know I am obsessed with the idea of religiosity as returning to oneself, one's true self - and this difficulty with homework stems from something that is not my true self, so its time to return to that self and finish this assignment.

Shabbat shalom.