So a true post will probably follow tonight, but I just wanted to give a little snippet today of something that happened yesterday.

Yesterday my Australian roomie from the kibbutz called me to wish me happy birthday. It was actually rather surprising because I wasn't expecting her to be in Israel until July, but I guess she came earlier. I started talking to her a bit, and she stops me and goes, "Wow man, you sounded so American right there!"

...well....yeah....what else would I sound like?

DJ ET

So last night at 3.30 am I was woken by…..



A trance remix of the film E.T.



Blasting. Just blasting. I have no idea from where. It was the sort of thing that the entire neighborhood could hear perfectly—each booming bass thud, each line from the movie….

As far as things I’ve been woken up by throughout my life go (alarms, Mom yelling, someone farting in my face, an earthquake, getting baptized by my friends at my 9th birthday, my French roommate screaming in her sleep), this one was kinda neat. It was the sort of thing that actually would have been awesome if it hadn’t been happening in the wee hours of the morning.

At first I was pissed off that I was woken up—because it takes A LOT to wake me up. But then I just sort of sat in bed, staring at the ceiling and listening. Who the hell comes up with these things? Is this a full time job? Why ET?

Little Road Trip On The Prairie:

So I’m planning a road trip with my mom. It’ll be me flying/driving solo from NY to Chicago, staying in Chicago for about a week, and then my mom meeting me in Chicago for the 2000 mile trek home to LA.

The thought of it is making me homesick. Unbearably homesick.

Probably the only thing I absolutely hate about Eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel (as opposed to the state or people), is that there are practically no places in the country where you are just…alone.

Maybe it’s the introvert in me rearing its ugly head right here, but what I love about the US is that for large stretches of the country you can be barreling down the highway and not see a soul. You can safely travel at Mach 3, and as you set cruise control you can peer out the window. Just miles and miles of emptiness. Either flat empty prairies or cornfields or canyons or mountains, but no people. It’s just you and, if you’ve got one, your co-pilot. And the two of you can put the windows down and scream the words to your favorite Brad Paisley song at the top of your lungs—and not a single person will hear you.

When you do come across civilization, you come to places like “Carhenge” or the hometown of Paul Bunyan or a place that boasts of being the birthplace of something called “corn salad,” or town named (for some inexplicable reason) Parachute.

And the people. There’s no guy in Israel like the guy from small-town Northern California who told us that if we don’t eat mountain lions then they will eat all our babies. Sure, Israel has some crazy people (just check out the average Israeli driving a car, and I DARE you to tell me they’re not crazy!), but Israel doesn’t have that particularly horrible blend of rural craziness that you find in the US. Israel has boring, obnoxious Haredim, but it doesn’t have Evangelical Christians, or people like the Duggars. I’m so homesick right now that I miss even that!



The problem with the land of Israel is that even in the rural areas you can still see the lights of a small village on a not-too-distant hilltop. Everyone lives in a fucking apartment because there’s no space for people to even have an LA-sized backyard, and so something like an entire cornfield for a backyard (like in Iowa) is a lost cause.

The thought of all this makes me wish Israel were more imperialistic. I would LOVE this country even more if we had control over the entire Middle East. Not for any political reasons, but just so I could drive through it and not be bothered by civilization.





What really got me thinking was when I saw Star Trek a couple days ago. It was just me and an American father and his Israeli children. The kids were probably only a couple years younger than me, probably just about to go into the army. The dad reminded me of my father—he clearly lived and breathed Star Trek. My dad watches Star Trek EVERY NIGHT, unless Beetlejuice or Ghostbusters is on, and has dragged our family to see every Star Trek movie. Star Trek isn’t exactly something I personally choose to watch, but because it’s so important to my dad, I’ve just sort of absorbed it. And I feel like most kids in America could recognize Spock or Kirk, just because they’re cultural icons. Like, if an American kid (regardless of whether or not their father is as big of a nerd as my dad) sees Leonard Nimoy wearing pointy ears and a bowl cut, they know it’s Spock. It’s just common knowledge. Just like everyone knows what Darth Vader looks like, or what George Washington looked like.

But this American dad’s Israeli children didn’t know. They didn’t know who Spock was, or what he looked like. They didn’t know who William Shatner was. They didn’t know anything. Before the movie started, the American dad was trying desperately to cram a lifetime’s worth of Star Trek knowledge into five minutes. He was telling them about who was who, what was what, what the basic premise of the series is. The way he spoke as if all the characters were real, like they were old friends of his, with reverence in his voice let me know that this guy clearly LOVED Star Trek like my dad does.

The movie started, and the Israeli children kept leaning into their dad to ask questions, and he kept trying to (quite desperately) explain Star Trek to them. Eventually during the hafsaka they left.

This utterly broke my heart. The man clearly loved Star Trek. But his Israeli children, because they didn’t grow up in a society where it is a cultural icon, didn’t get it. They couldn’t even follow the film, they were so confused.

I’m afraid of that happening to me if I stay. My children (should I have any) won’t understand Star Trek, or what it’s like to have a backyard instead of a balcony, or what it is to drive through the middle of nowhere—truly the middle of nowhere—and to enjoy the scenery, or what country music is, or what it’s like to go to school in the US, or….everything. I’m not even talking about LIKING here because I won’t be too bothered if my kids don’t end up liking half the stuff I like, I’m talking about UNDERSTANDING. I’m afraid that if I have kids here, I’m going to be raising foreigners. It’d be weird raising kids as Israeli scouts instead of as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, and not seeing baseball games over the summer with them (or—even worse—having to explain baseball to them!), and….everything. Absolutely everything would be different. Everything about childhood is different here—the games, the books, the songs, the mentality.

I know it seems ridiculous to get so worked up over something that is probably years and years away from happening (if indeed I end up having kids at all) and it’s especially ridiculous since it was triggered from watching Star Trek….
But at the same time, the thought of having to explain things like, “Beam me up!” or what a phaser is or what the hell a Vulcan is….just appalls the shit out of me.


Okay, I gotta say I’m feeling a little bit better. I’m playing my iTunes library right now, and playing stuff that reminds me of the US is upsetting me at the moment, as is stuff that makes me think of Israel. So instead I put on the song “You Know My Name” (the Bond theme song for Casino Royale), and I instantly burst into laughter. A couple weeks ago I promised myself that if I do end up serving in “Collection of Field Intelligence,” then I would allow myself to hum any and all Bond themes as well as the song “Secret Agent Man” to myself at all times and in all places during my three years of service, even if it annoys the crap out of people, be they friends, bunkmates or random people on the bus. This, I figure, would be my right.

That alone is reason enough to stay in Israel!

Hokey Pokey Army

Probably the worst thing about the enlistment process is the fact that at any given moment you have no idea what’s going on. I feel like most of the process involves being buffeted helplessly from station to station, from interview to interview, from test to test…it’s a bit like being Aeneas, except at the end of the process you don’t get to establish the foundations of Ancient Rome. You just get some boring two-year job.

What can you expect? You can expect, on several occasions, to get calls from random army human resources divisions (they’ll introduce themselves immediately after you say, “hello,” and they’ll speak so quickly that you have no idea what their name is or what division they work for). They’ll then quickly tell you that you have to be at X spot on Y date—they’ll say this information so quickly that it’s more like vomiting than speaking. You’ll ask specifically what it’s for, and you’ll get the same vague, generic answer: “It’s connected to your army placement.”

Well what the hell does that mean? The pee test I did in the army enlistment center was connected to my army placement, as was the mile I had to run at the combat gibush, as were the computer tests I took at the jobnik test day. So how the hell am I supposed to prepare for this latest labor? Should I assume it’ll be a three-for-one test, and prepare to pee, run and test my brains all in the same day?

Today was one such mystery task “connected to my army placement.” All I knew was that I had to be in a specific building in a specific city at a specific time. And I was told, “G-d help you if you are late!”

So I got there about ten minutes before my scheduled appointment time. I rang a bell on a door, and after a few minutes a non-descript man answered the door. Really, the best way I can describe this guy is to say that there wasn’t anything about him worth describing. Bland features, bland voice….whatever. He ushered me into the waiting room and then told me that he would be with me in 30 minutes. So much for “G-d help you if you are late!”

And so I was left completely alone in this waiting room. Kind of freaked out and still not entirely sure what I was going to have to do at this latest army task, I cautiously made my way to one of 13 enormous chairs. I sat, completely alone in this enormous waiting room, filled with empty chairs, and started looking around. The walls were absolutely white—not just white, but a harsh white that, when combined with the harsh fluorescent lighting from the ceiling, made me feel like my eyes were about to shrivel up and die. “I’m melting! What a world, what a world….” It gave the room a sort of sterile, hospital-like feeling, minus the unsanitary fact that on each of the unoccupied chairs there were hairs and footprints and flakes of dead skin. This proof of the existence of other people in my shoes was both comforting and disgusting at the same time.

I settled down in my seat and tried to wait patiently. In complete silence. I swear, the color white makes a sound. So I’m sitting there, the walls are droning on in the background, saying, “WHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE.” And the air conditioning is humming quietly, and the loudest thing in the room, drowning out the white walls and the AC, is my breathing. Deafening. It sounded like the breathing you hear in trailers for horror films. Like, “BREATHE…..Is the monster gone? BREATHE…..BREATHE…..Aaaaaaaa!!!!!!!” If that makes any sense.

After about 10 minutes of complete boredom I got the idea that maybe sitting in this oppressively white, abandoned and bare room was in itself the test. I tried to slyly look for hidden camera, but after about five minutes of looking I realized that I’m probably not interesting enough to the army to be subjected to weird tests like this. So I made a mental note to not pick my nose, just in case, but stopped looking for hidden cameras.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog….when I get nervous, I pee. A lot. So obviously while waiting in this room it dawned on me that I needed to pee before going into my latest army task. Normally I’d ask permission to use a private office’s private bathroom…but in this case there was no one to ask. I was completely alone in this large waiting room. The exit door was locked, as was the door to what I figured was the main office. I turned a corner, passing through an extremely bare kitchen (just a sink and four small jars of coffee/cocoa powder—no spoons or even cups!), and came into a tiny toilet closet. I did my business, then flushed….and

WOOOOOOOSH

A deafening roar comes out of the toilet. Like, not a flush, but a noise that lets you know that you have done something irreversibly horrible to the toilet. The toilet growls, like it’s angry for revenge or something. I spend the next 10 minutes standing next to the screaming toilet, with my finger to my lips as I whisper, “Shhhhhh!” like it’s an upset baby instead of a toilet noisily demanding justice. I keep quietly repeating to myself, “All I did was pee! Shhhhh! Shhhh!”

Finally, over the angry growl of the toilet I heard the guy in charge start to come out of his office, so I rushed out to the waiting area to act as if I had been there the entire time. He doesn’t seem to notice the sonic boom coming out of the toilet…

Once inside the office (almost as bare as the waiting room—just a plain desk, two chairs, a telephone, a wilting plant, a pen, and a binder) , he asks me about some of my details. What is my name? What is my ID number? What is my phone number? I answer all these questions, and then he explains to me what this day is. It’s basically just another interview where he’s going to ask me about myself, and he’s going to ask about jobs in the army, and if there’s something I want to ask for I can do it now. And so the interview starts:

“Tell me about yourself.”

How the hell am I supposed to answer that? What does he want to know about me? Does he want facts about me? Like a biography or something? Does he want to know my philosophical beliefs? How detailed am I supposed to be?

Instead of answering, I just sort of cough and fidget uncomfortably, saying, “Ummmmm,” quite a bit, hoping that this will encourage him to follow up with a more specific question. But I get nothing. So then I said something like, “Look, I’m fine with telling you about anything, but I just don’t know what specifically you want to know.” This made the interviewer reflect for a moment, and then he issued a new demand:

“Okay. Tell me about school.”

Again I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and wondered what I was supposed to tell him. Did he want to know about my grades? What subjects I liked? My social life? My extracurricular activities? My huge crush on a guy who in senior year turned out to be gay?

But as I tried to form the right kind of answer in my head, I looked up at the interviewer. Big mistake.

This guy brought eye contact to a new level. This was not normal eye contact; this was a staring contest that the guy didn’t seem to realize I had already forfeited. I thought to myself that this must be what it’s like for Cyclops from X-Men to look at you without his protective glasses. It was that same intense burning sensation. I thought maybe he was trying to achieve some kind of telepathy with me, and I wanted to tell him, “Sir, no matter how hard you stare, you’re still not going to be able to read my mind.”

Anyway, somehow I got past the fact that apparently the interviewer didn’t need to blink like most humans do, and I found it a little bit easier to open up to his questions.

It did get really confusing though because I mentioned that I like to write stories about people I encounter. When he asked me to explain how I saw myself, how I would write about myself in one of these stories, and I said that I’m not all that exciting, I’m just an observer. He asked what I meant, and I said that I personally am quite boring, but my life just happens to intersect with the lives of interesting people, and I like to write about them. He asked for an example, and I brought up the Hokey Pokey Man.

The Hokey Pokey Man is a man that became sort of a legend of my childhood. I was a little girl, standing outside the White House with my family, waiting to go inside for a tour. It was freezing, we had been waiting for hours, and we were all miserable, when suddenly and completely out of the blue, we hear a loud voice singing the Hokey Pokey. We all looked around for the source of this sound, and down the street we found him. The Hokey Pokey Man. A man who dressed 100% like the respectable businessman or lawyer or whatever that he was, but who also wore enormous, bright yellow DJ headphones. I could say he was running down the street, but I think the word “prancing” would be more fitting. So this man pranced down the street in his sharp business suit, belting the Hokey Pokey at the top of his lungs, and flinging his arms into the air in time with the music. As all eyes waiting in line at the White House turned towards the Hokey Pokey Man, he seemed to be completely oblivious….still skipping and twirling down the street in his immaculately kept business suit and singing and dancing to the Hokey Pokey. And off he danced into the distance, like some kind of flamboyantly gay cowboy riding off into the rhinestone sunset.

The interviewer asked me how this story shows how I am, and I explained my telling him this story in itself is telling him about myself. While my family may only vaguely remember the Hokey Pokey Man, I’m the only one who is going to keep telling the story, who’s going to write about it, and who is going to spend great chunks of time for the rest of her life wondering what ever became of him, wondering if he’s still dancing the Hokey Pokey down the street in DC or if he’s made to a different state or different song by now.

So this guy from the kibbutz who keeps asking about my "fiance" (on facebook I'm married to a character from Ancient Roman epic poetry....), and finally, months later, after yet ANOTHER question about my fiance (which I kept trying to avoid answering) I just said:

"Do yourself a favor and google 'Pius Aeneas.' "

Urgh. People who don't study Latin are retarded.

A "demilitarized Palestinian state," Bibi?

Okay, but can we make sure that includes bulldozers too?

Tourism and a random Zohan quote

Community Watch Guy: “I’m terrified right now, totally terrified. ‘Shitting my pants’ doesn’t come close to describing it. I wish I WAS shitting my pants, that’s how I feel.”

Zohan: It’s just a patrol.

Community Watch Guy: “What if something goes down? I don’t know if I have the courage to do something about it. What if something goes down and I didn’t do something and someone got killed? I would have to live with that. I mean, that’s….I’d…I’d be happier shitting my pants. Much happier.”

--You Don’t Mess With The Zohan.




Two tourists at a bus stop. A short man in a baseball cap, high Thorlo socks, shorts and button down shirt kept nervously glancing at the sign with all the bus numbers, then glancing back down at his map while groaning with frustration.
His wife, wearing a long flowy skirt with sandals and an old lady tank top tried to calm him down. “Marvin…the man said to take the 18.”
This seemed to irritate Marvin for some reason. “Well, damnit Maggie, do you SEE an 18 on the sign?”
“Don’t get snippy with me,” Maggie said very quietly, “I’m only telling you what the man said…”
Marvin just let out a frustrated groan, paused for a bit, then took another wild glance at the sign. “Well, you’re not a lot of help.”
Maggie let out a quiet sigh and said, “I’m sorry, I’m just a little bit turned around.”

“Turned around.” Not lost, but simply turned around. The phrase reminds me of my parents. Well, not my dad. My dad doesn’t get lost. Drop the man blindfolded in deserted outer Siberia or in the Amazon, and within minutes he’ll be able to tell you EXACTLY how to get to the nearest luxury hotel, or (if he’s hungry) the nearest McDonald’s that is still serving breakfast.

But my mom….the woman has no sense of direction, and whenever you call her out on it (“Mom, our house is down the street, how do you not know where we are???”) she lets out a quiet sigh and says, “I’m just…just a bit turned around.”
No, ‘lost’ would imply that the woman is a blind idiot when it comes to directions and surroundings, but ‘turned around”……It’s passive, like my mother had no control over the situation, but what is the active agent?
‘Turned around.” Like my mother was at a birthday party playing Pin The Tail On The Donkey or swinging at a piñata, and an adult blindfolded her, spun her around several times, and THEN told her to move towards the target. That is ‘turned around.’ So when my mother is lost in the middle of New York, or England, or even within our own neighborhood in Los Angeles, and she sighs and says that she’s ‘turned around,’ she’s implying that some kind of outside, malevolent spirit has blindfolded her, turned her around, and THEN told her to find our destination, so OF COURSE she can’t find it. Like evil fairies have come out of the woods for the sole purpose of turning my mother around and getting her lost. Which explains the sigh that always accompanies the expression, “I’m turned around.” The sigh is my mother’s way of saying, “Oh great, not again, those fucking assholes turned me around again. Great, just my luck.”
Aw….I miss my parents….

.....Haven't written much lately....Basically I've been really busy between reading the Twilight series and going to America

I think I'll properly update sometime this week. In the meantime, here's some big news: I got my official answer from the army. I am going in in November and that's final. No moving it to July or whatever.

I've decided that won't be so bad. I guess I can travel a lot afterwards before going to university..... I'm thinking maybe I'll go to Australia.....but I guess I don't really have to start planning yet.