Yes, I aspire to be Laura Ingalls Wilder, but that doesn't mean I am Laura!

Let's start off with good news: I talked to my mom last night and she said that if I really wanted to stay, she'd be supportive of it even though she'd obviously prefer that I came home (or at least back to the same continent...). So that's nice.


Today was a day of snapping at people:

1)
Today I was about to walk out the door of the laundry room when I heard someone call out, "LAURA!" My name's not Laura, so obviously I kept walking. But then I heard it again, this time in an annoyed tone: "LAURA!!" But I kept walking, wondering who this Laura was. Then I heard it a third time. "LAURA!!!!!!!!!" I whipped my head around cos it was starting to get annoying, and I was wondering where the hell this Laura was.

And everyone in the laundry room was looking at me with absolute annoyance on their faces. So we just stared at each other for a second. It was just me looking at the angry faces of 5 angry women with looks that suggested that I better explain myself if I know what's good for me. Then French Bitch yells at me in Hebrew, "Why didn't you respond, Laura??" So I just yell back in English, "COS MY NAME'S NOT LAURA! IT WAS SAMANTHA TWO MONTHS AGO, AND IT'S STILL SAMANTHA!"

And then without waiting to hear what they were calling me back for, I just left for lunch. Oh Goodness Gracious, it was so liberating!

2)
Today the "House Mom" was dictating a fax for me to send to Misrad Hapnim to get an appointment, and she told me to sign off with something like "Toda Merosh" or something like that. And I wrote it exactly where I was taught in school to write "sincerely" or "yours truly," which is slightly right of center. I leaned back to admire my work--my carefully crafted letters (I tried so hard to not look like a baby when I wrote)--and then the House Mom saw that I had written my sign off slightly right of center.
Well, it turns out in Hebrew you write it slightly LEFT of center. And, holy crap, did the "House Mom" let me know. You would have thought that, rather than not writing something in the correct place, I had committed a war crime. This was an atrocity on par with the slaughter of Jews during the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms and the Holocaust combined. This was not just an error in a letter but an attack on Israel itself. She snapped at me and demanded to know how I could possibly think to place the sign off phrase there. She seemed extremely upset about it. So I just looked at her and said in Hebrew, "You're right, I was born here and I was raised here and I should know how Israelis write letters because I learned how to do this in my Israeli school." Actually, it was pretty cool because for the first time in the past two months, I saw someone actually look apologetic. Or constipated. You can never really tell.

She then slipped into English and her tone became a lot softer. "You don't put here in America?" "No, we put it here." "Oh. .....I understand now."
She suggested that maybe we could cross it out and rewrite it on the correct side, but now it was a point of pride for me to do things my way. So I gave her the nastiest glare and she just backed off.



Oh man. I've turned into a bitch.