Shabbat with Yavneh
No class this morning. It's Friday. Good thing too, I was up until 4AM. My alarm still went off at 9 (I turned off one but forgot the other) but I managed to sleep until almost noon. Then I threw together my outline for Legal Writing, which was due at 4PM, and emailed it off. I'm setting up IM lists for my Contracts and Civ Pro classes so I spent an hour working on that too. Then I went to get a haircut. Here begins the adventure. So I was going to this place recommended to me by a friend in the environmental law group (or was it youth justice?). It was on the ultra-down-low. Under cover. All that jazz. I found the building pretty easily by the description. A big curved place on 116th street before Riverside Park. The front door was locked. Couldn't even get to the intercom. I went around back and down a small flight of stairs. No signs anywhere indicating a barbershop by the way. At the bottom of the stairs was a buzzer with the name above it almost completely rubbed out. I took a gamble and rang. A moment later the door opened and I entered the building. I took a left down a narrow hall as per my friend's instructions and found it, Encore Beauty Salon. It was like entering a time warp. The haircutting ladies were ancient and spoke poor English. They used scissors exclusively, no electrics. Everything was very slow paced. Snip snip snip, pause...snip snip snip, pause...it was like entering another world. The haircut wasn't too good unfortunately because the lady didn't understand what I wanted. But I have a feeling if I'd wanted a cut from the '50s she could have done an amazing job. The weirdest thing though was the price. $11 and they don't accept tips. Even Supercuts is $18 in New York City. So odd. Anyway, I went to the gym, picked up some wine for shabbat on the way home (I chose a spicy merlot to go with the steak and pasta salad and a dessert wine for kiddush that we ended up not using sadly). Got dressed up and went to Hillel for services, the orthodox ones this time. The place was packed (I was 30 minutes late). There were at least 300 people there. It was crazy. Wasn't feeling it any more than I did at the conservative service though. Then I went to Danny's for dinner. Small crowd this week, just six of us. Tons of food. Spirits seemed a little low though. Better luck next time.
