Reminiscing (or Where's Mah Jew-Fro At??)

Today, as I happened to be going through the study, I found a stockpile of photos. And I mean real photos. Which came from negatives and such. They catalogue my life (and that of my sisters) from 1998 to 2003.

So I'm going to look back, and take you all with me as I do so, wondering what the hell happened and why I am no longer adorable. Because I was. Once.

1998. My last year of preschool.
This was my heyday. I wasn't any more photogenic then than I am now (take a look at the school ID photo Vivien added of me on facebook. It makes my eyes bleed.), but I had the last vestiges of my platinum blonde Jew-fro (there, Monica. I called it a Jew-fro). I was able to pull of pigtails. And I did it with panache.
In retrospect, I had bitchen hair back then. Of course I hated it at the time, but looking at the photos of five year old me, I wish I had had the foresight to scalp myself.

For those of you who didn't know me when I was extremely young (namely everyone reading this blog), I initially had Marilyn Monroe hair. I kidd you not. Up until age four, I had the most fantastically curly white blonde hair. Then for some unknown reason it started getting darker, but at age five, I still had a bit of blonde in there. By 1999, my hair was solidly the boring brown colour it is now. I also had ringlets in preschool.

What the *expletive deleted*?! Did I not spend a few hours trying to get ringlets, only to give up and put HAIR WAX in whilst hoping for the best?

The answer to that is yes.

I so should have scalped myself.

1999: Kindy. There are some marvellously cute photos of me in my new school uniform (which in its own right was heinously ugly). By then I was far too mature for pigtails (or so I thought. Hell, I'd wear pigtails now if I didn't think I'd look like a massive wanker), but I could still wear a ponytail and not have my hair resembling one great big dreadlock by the end of the day.

As a bit of a sidebar, that's why my hair is ALWAYS in a tight french braid. It's because I don't trust it.

There are also some really cute pictures of me not in school uniform. Back in the days where forest green leggings coupled with brown doc martens and an eye-burningly bright magenta jumper was considered the height of cool.

This is also the beginning of my overalls phase.

Best. Phase. Ever.

I hated them at the time, but looking back, wow. I can't even articulate how awesomely I dressed back then.

There's also the Euro/North America trip we took back when dad was diagnosed with cancer. Good memories.

2000: Year 1&2. Maaaaaaaaan that was a traumatic year.

There's only one thing worse than being pulled from your year group. That's being thrust into the year group above you as 'the nerdy kid'. That's one of the reasons I left Emanuel as soon as I humanly could.

Otherwise, more overalls. I had a magenta pair with Sylvester the cat on them. Actually, when I think about it, I had a lot of magenta clothing over the years. I'm wearing a magenta singlet at the moment. Trippy...

There were also red overalls, and yellow overalls, and a fantastic purple pair which my youngest sister now wears...
Overalls to the max.

2001: a Space Odyssey.

Sorry. I couldn't help it.

Year 3. I had Mr Lucre that year. Head of Drama at Emanuel (K-12).

That was the year I played Horatio in the school's production of Hamlet: 3001. That was fun.

Otherwise, this year begins to mark not only the end of the two plaits phase, but also catalogues the last of my jaw pre-surgery. But for that we would have to move on to...

2002: Year 4. There are some rather gory photos of me just after smashing my face onto concrete (oops). I broke my jaw in 27 places, smashed most of my front teeth, bit through my left cheek... I looked nasty.

On the upside, the reconstructive surgery left me with a greatly improved jawline.

The only other photos from 2002 are from speech day. They focus on my older sister, Sarah, and myself.

Sarah got lots of prizes because she was the head prefect blah blah blah.

I, as it turns out, was blacklisted from receiving any prizes. It had always puzzled me as to why, even though I always got the best marks, I didn't win any prizes. I found out today from Erica, one of my primary school Hebrew teachers whom I now babysit for and who was there as I looked through all these old photos, that the head of primary had sent around a specific memo saying that I was going to be leaving Emanuel at the end of that year (because I was transferring to the public system) and thus I was not to receive any prizes, deserving or not. The prizes were to go to students who would be staying at the school.

I was unimpressed when I found that out, to say the least. I am so opening a can of verbal whoop-ass on him the next time I happen to be at Emanuel.

But enough complaining about the internal politics of Jewish day schools.

It's time for 2003...

Year 5. Sheltered little Adela entered the big bad world of public schooling. And was scared shitless.

Emanuel at the time I left had perhaps 500-6-- students in K-12. My year, with 34 kids, was the smallest in the school. At Hurstville Public School, there were over 1000 children. Year 6 had over 200 students. The OC comprised of 4 classes of 30 students each, as opposed to Emanuel's 15 students in a composite 5/6 class.

But photographically, all that remains are photos of Sarah's Bat-Mizvah.

All I can say is, Dayumm.

The dress I wore on that day looks better on me now than it did on me then.

So. That's me looking back on photos I haven't seen in ages. I would have to say that I really lost a lot of cuteness as I aged. Bummer.

And seriously - where's mah Jew-fro at?


To summ up today's post, my mother just found out that I want to do Mechanical Engineering at uni.

Her response was "Why don't you just aspire to primary school teaching at UWS."

Elitist much??

Translitteration

From Kindergarten until Year 4 I attended a Jewish school - Emanuel School (although at the time I attended it was still The Emanuel School, abbreviated to TES).

This meant numerous things.

Not only do I know the correct plan of action should: a gunman enter the school; a bomb be planted on the grounds; the school be under siege; etc. ad nauseam, but I can also recite prayers in Hebrew with the kind of fluency that can only be gained from having to do so daily for five years.

It also means that I'm reasonably proficient in Hebrew.

Being a Jewish school, we were taught Hebrew from Kindy in the desperate hope we'd beat Moriah in Hebrew come the HSC, which as it turned out, we actually did in 2009 (Moriah are our deadly rivals. A joke which explains the situation reasonably well goes as follows:
How many Emanuel kids does it take to change a lightbulb?
Ten. One to change the bulb, and the other nine to run down the hill to Moriah to brag about how well they did it.)

This early start in Hebrew had two main effects.

The first, rather more disconcerting one, is the fact that I can still sing along to the alphabet song in Hebrew. The fact that I still remember it creeps me out somewhat.

The second it that I know how Hebrew is actually pronounced. So it pisses me off when an author translitterates something in a mediochre manner.

I am aware that I have not as yet vented my spleen regarding the text I was just forced to study in English - The 5oth Gate - on this blog, but suffice it to say that I thoroughly dislike it. And one of the main reasons is because the author translitterates in the shoddiest manner I have ever come across.

Translitteration is the practice of taking a language which is in character format and phoenetically substituting the characters to english ones. This is all well and good for those who haven't ever learned Hebrew or Yiddish and would thus regard text therein as a bunch of squiggles, but that doesn't mean the author is allowed to merely stich whichever letters he so chooses in whichever order he chooses on the page, and then call it Yiddish (or Polish, which he also did) because it's not.

It's crap.

I had two main issues with Mark Baker's translitteration of Eastern European languages.

The first regarded a mention of the shtetl of Łodz. Łodz is pronounced in a manner akin to the word lodge (the 'o' sound is slightly lengthened, but that's about as close as it'll get without the use of actual phoenetics). Which made me wonder why Baker said that the Ł was pronounced as a W. I know it isn't, because a bunch of my ancestors came from there. The rest of my Polish forebears came from a tiny town called Mława (pronounced kind of like Mølava). Again note the fact that the ł is pronounced as an l not a w.

My other main issue was the fact that although he is from Melbourne, Baker's Hebrew and Yiddish pronunciation is that of an American Lubovitch from the eastern seaboard. It pissed me off, more than the fact that my teacher couldn't even read out the translitteration as it was written, let alone correctly.

If someone is going to translitterate something so that the masses can get the gist of it, THEY SHOULDN'T SUBSTITUTE LETTER SOUNDS IN A MANNER THAT MAKES THEM SEEM LIKE A WANKER!

Thanks go to Damon for inadvertently giving me the idea for this post.