The Nate Newsletter

Today, January 19, 2019, I undertook a rather large community service project in Oakland. This project, above all others, was one I found very meaningful because it is relevant to something I am very interested in: music. Above all else, congratulations to Jordan of my troop of Scouts for organizing and carrying out this project. For the rank of Eagle Scout, it is mandatory that each candidate plan and execute a massive service project from scratch. His project will have a huge impact on a local middle school that will only increase throughout time. Essentially, this project was to revitalize the music room and general music program at a local middle school. An itemized list of everything I helped do was as follows: we were going to repair every music stand in a school of 600 students, clean gum off the carpets (a gross job), clean the cabinets, repaint the doors to existing cabinets to make them nicer, and build two new shelves from scratch, each designed for a different ...

In summary: The California DMV absolutely sucks. To be fair, some of the issues today were not on my behalf or the behalf of the California DMV. Nevertheless, I expected to walk in and get my Learner's Permit in 30 minutes. Instead, a whole host of surprises waited for me-- I achieved my objective a whole three and a half hours after I started. There are two DMV offices near I live, of which I had an appointment at one of them to apply for a Learner's Permit in California and take the written exam. I get there and it goes smoothly until I am told that the camera does not work. I do not understand why they cannot use a cell phone photo, but the camera at the DMV does not work, and they need your photograph so you can take the exam, so I can only get this permit if I go to a different DMV. After a long drive to the other side of town where the other DMV is, I walk into a line nearly out the door-- at least 25 people in front of me. I did not have an appointment and the appoi...

Hello. I returned home yesterday to an unexpected series of events. I thought this was an interesting story that happened by random chance. My brother broke his finger the day after his Bar Mitzvah playing Flag Football. It's been in a cast for quite some time and the fracture appears to have healed; however, there was another problem. His young hands were going to keep growing, so his finger was going to grow at a crooked angle that would bend over time. I expected him to go to an appointment yesterday afternoon in order to get a cast that would correct his finger. However, at roughly 4:30 PM, he called me on his cell phone and stated that he would need to either undergo surgery on his finger that day or live with a crooked finger for the rest of his life. My response: "Of course you should get the ******* surgery! You don't want to have a crooked finger for the rest of your life!" While surgeries are painful for a few days after one undergoes them, they...

Yesterday, December 1, 2018, was the date that my brother celebrated his Bar Mitzvah. I thought I would take some time to reflect on the festivities and provide some description of what was an amazing event. For security reasons, I will not name the synagogue where the ceremony occurred or the venue for the party that followed. While every Bar Mitzvah ceremony occurs on Saturday, the Jewish Shabbat (Sabbath), the festivities actually start the night before. At the synagogue that hosted the ceremony, the person whose Bar Mitzvah is the same week recites a prayer at the Friday night ceremony, called the Kiddish . Typically, a Kiddish ceremony involves lighting candles, uncovering bread (specifically, challah ), and drinking wine from a special cup (since my brother is too young to legally drink, grape juice served as a substitute). For this ceremony, my mother, grandmother, and great-aunt were all on the bema (the holy, often elevated area at the front of the synagogue) with him. Aft...

The first time I wrote about the horrific fires in California, there was thick smoke outside my window and the air outside was so unhealthy that I chose to wear a respirator outdoors. The air quality was so bad that when my school was canceled for three days, I went to Santa Barbara to escape the air for a weekend. The air now has returned to normal. The Woolsey Fire near Malibu is nearly 100% contained and the Camp Fire near Chico is 95% contained. But the unhealthy air that covered the Bay Area for days was merely a nuisance. Football games getting canceled, including the Cal vs. Stanford game, a musical that I was supposed to see getting postponed, and all the temporary closings of businesses in San Francisco are annoying, but not dangerous. In Paradise, California, and other nearby towns, 84 people lost their lives and hundreds are still missing. Eighteen thousand structures were destroyed, including 14,000 homes. The destruction is unbearable. My thoughts and prayers go to tho...

Hello. As the two large fires currently burning in California continue to do so, I feel more inclined and obligated to write about this topic. The Camp Fire in Butte County, this morning, has reached an unacceptably high death toll of 29, and the entire town of Paradise, California is nearly gone. Malibu has also undergone severe destruction. Firefighters are experiencing difficulty fighting this pair of blazes and the state of California is currently undergoing a crisis. Tens have died, thousands of structures have been destroyed, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have been evacuated and forced to depart their homes, only able to hope that their home and all of their belongings will not be the fire's next victim. These conflagrations have ruined and, in some cases, ended lives. Fires are devastating. I have deep sympathy for those who died in this tragic and horrible event. I also strongly hope that those whose homes have been destroyed or whose loved ones have died c...