Normally this time of year I get all excited about my NCAA picks. Well, not so much this year for a number of reasons. First, as next week is Spring Break, I'll be missing all the regional action since I'll be spending that week in Gulfport, MS to help with Hurricane Katrina recovery. Second, read this post from a year ago, and simply replace Bucknell with Bradley to get a feel for my sentiments this year. Once again I picked Kansas as one of my five teams in my family's pool, and once again they lost in the first round! I'm a moron. You know, I think the fact that Kansas was so good when I was a kid has subconsciously skewed my preferences to choose them. No more: I've touched the pot on the stove enough times now, and have learned my lesson. (Don't pick Kansas. Don't pick Kansas. Must keep repeating...) A third reason I'm not all that excited about the NCAA's this year is that my uncle hasn't emailed out other people's picks, thereby relieving me of my obsessive compulsion to constantly update the scoreboard or write PHP code.
In other news, Chicklet came to visit yesterday because I made my Princeton debut as leader of Shabbat services. I only made one mistake, which is obviously one more than the goal, but I'll take it. (The mistake was that I wanted to do the "MIT" tune to a psalm, but I've been assimilated to Tiger culture so much that the "Princeton" tune was stuck in my head. I ended up just reading the three lines in some halfway fashion with the congregation sufficiently confused :) And dinner at Hillel/CJL was more or less devoid of undergrads, thanks to Spring Break, creating a different (better? less pretentious?) atmosphere.
My teaching of Trenton high school seniors continued yesterday, with the upbeat topic of genocide as the theme. We began with a lecture about how countries interact, which imparted the knowledge of what an embassy is. (Useful info if any of them ever travel abroad, and a word none of them knew beforehand.) We then broke out into groups and discussed the Rwandan genocide. My group focused on how to prevent genocide, namely by making sure the two sides of the conflict communicate with one another and avoid hate-filled language. We discussed the mentality of fearing another culture or race. The kids seemed to understand, but unfortunately, I don't think they retained much. Ah well, a worthy effort.
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