Naoko’s Trans Log

 Having decided to convert to Judaism, I now had to talk to a rabbi to officially start the process. This got delayed for many reasons; I’ve been very busy with school, my mom was considering moving and I didn’t want to contact a Rabbi nearby only to later move to another congregation, and I had a hard time—as usual—writing the email that would start it all. My mom eventually realized that there would not be any benefits in moving so she renewed our lease for two more years. With that safety, I then decided what my temple would be; I had attended many online Shabbat services from there, and I liked the welcoming environment. To attend Shabbat, I could just have filled out their in-person registration form, however, I thought talking with the Rabbi first would be a better idea. So after months of having the email on the back burner, I finally managed to put it together. I learned that Rabbis are encouraged to make three vigorous attempts to dissuade a potential convert to filter out...

This last semester was crazy! I handed in my last assignment under a deadline extension and still late yesterday. When the semester started I tried to figure out if my workload was similar to or higher than my past semester and at first it seemed to be par, however, that quickly changed. For one of my classes, Form Language, each week I was asked to make a sculpture of sorts. Bending strips of paper, bending wire, cutting foam, using clay, etc. These projects required me to go to school when I didn't even have class—one such sculpture took eight hours to finish, although it was the simplest one, I'll get to that. For that same class, after the sculptures, we began designing our own lounge chair. In the ideation process, we had to draw 100 sketches—I believe I mentioned that in a previous post and that combined with assignments for other classes. I went from being able to observe Shabbat to needing to use that time to work on homework, it feels terrible. I began staying up all n...