Unsolicited Advice

So I seem to have inadvertently started learning Hebrew. I was working for Hillel as an usher at Yom Kippur services, and after gleaning some useful Yiddish from a grad student ( shabbas goy , "Sabbath gentile", because while there are seemingly-endless varieties of work observant Jews are not supposed to do on holy days, nowhere on the list does it say you cannot hire the goyim  to follow you around and do it for you) and explaining to several people that I had no idea what the difference was between the Conservative and Reform services (my solid Irish family is technically Roman Catholic, entering into our fifth consecutive decade of lapsitude), I headed into the boring stretch of the job. Hillel issues (free) tickets to their services for gatekeeping purposes, and the ushers have to stay on duty in case anyone comes in late. Essentially, you just hang out at the door and eavesdrop. I did the same for Rosh HaShanah. High Holiday services involve a lot of chant-singing. ...

One of the very nicest things about the Kindle is that, when I am insomniac and dysphoric and bored and realize that the internet will rise up as one and slay me if I write one more freaking thing about the Incredible Hulk, is that it makes it very easy to at least pretend I'm fixing that. It handles PDFs natively, which means I can put the 400+ page Hebrew textbook on it and not dislocate my shoulder carrying it around. MIT and Harvard have also recently banded together (with a few other schools -- I think Stanford is in on this now, too) to publish a listing of free courses. You can't get an honest-to-God degree this way, but for a small fee you can get a load of certificates in whatever you manage to learn. It occurs to me that I may be able to use this as leverage to pry my way back into school, where I'm decidedly happier. And that if I can do so at one of the private institutions out here, there will be no faffing about with grants and loans -- if Harvard or MIT wa...