You know what I feel like at this place? Everyone’s therapist. I mean, I like to be helpful and I like to find solutions to friend’s problems….but today for example I had a guy I just met a couple days ago telling me all about his love life issues. In excruciating, emotional detail. The way he was talking to me, you’d think he was laying down on a couch with me in a chair behind him taking notes. I’m like, “Dude, I JUST met you!!!” Except I didn’t say it. I just tried to say comforting things, but it’s hard to do that when you don’t know the person….
Then there’s the French guy. Holy fucking balls, it’s like 2 hours a day I have to listen to him talk about his love life problems. It’s pissing me off because we used to be friends, and now it’s a one-way street. All we get to talk about is HIS issue. This single issue. The other day he apologized to me for threatening me all the time and being an ass in general—but then a couple days ago he bragged to me that when he apologized to a bunch of people (including me) the other day, he was only doing it because the girl he is obsessed with demanded that he did. So he says this to me, he admits that he isn’t sorry for being threatening or scary or insanity-inducing, but then he expects me to want to keep listening to all his shit and problems. Why? Because I’m not his friend, I’m his therapist.
Also, I’m thinking that if the Women of the Wash respond to me in English when I talk to them in Hebrew one more time…I’m gonna charge them. I get paid to talk to little girls in English, so I feel like I should get paid if I talk to these women in English against my will. Either that or I could do what my mom told me: “Wait, Sammy, you said your boss is French, right? Well, from now on, whenever she responds to you in English, you should respond to her in French. See how she likes it.” I think my mom’s a genius sometimes….
Also: yesterday in Jerusalem we (among other things) went to the Knesset and Yad Vashem. And well, you know me. Or maybe you don’t. But maybe by now you’ve figured out that I tend to internalize (is that even a word?) emotions more than I express them. Apart from anger or excitement, I think most of my powerful reactions to things are done in my head. So we’re in the Knesset and we’re looking at this really interesting tapestry, and I’m just taking it all in quietly. But my roommate is one of those people that needs to outwardly express things at all times—so she kept repeating things like, “Ooooh! Look the colors!” “Isn’t this just incredible??!?!” or “Wow, isn’t it amazing how he ____?!” And I just kind of ignored it because I was deep in my own thoughts and enjoying the art in my head (I mean, the enjoyment occurred in my head…I wasn’t looking at art inside my head….whoa….). And then my roommate gives me this look as if I’m crazy, and she says to me in this vicious and condescending tone, “You just don’t appreciate art!” So I turn to her and said, “No, I just quietly appreciate art.” But she didn’t really get it.
Then in Yad Vashem…oh Jesus was I ready to kill her. Look, I don’t think I need to waste a bunch of space to say that obviously the Holocaust upsets me—1) I’m a human being, 2) I’m a Jewish human being, and 3) I’m a Jewish human being with roots in Eastern Europe. So I think we can just go on the assumption that I find the Yad Vashem experience extremely upsetting. Well, the thing is that I don’t always make it entirely obvious that I’m upset—yesterday at Yad Vashem I didn’t cry, and for the most part I kept a pretty calm outward expression. This is despite the fact that seeing some of the exhibits, or reading some of the information or looking at some of the pictures was absolutely unbearable.
My roommate on the other hand cried. She was a total mess. Now please don’t think for a minute that I’m criticizing her—I don’t for a second blame her for crying. The problem was that her way of experiencing the museum involved jabbing me with her elbow constantly to get my attention to say, “OH MY G-D ISN’T THIS HORRIBLE?!?!” I quietly told her that I agreed, but then went back to reflecting in my head everything that I was seeing/reading/etc. Later we came to a few pictures of men being hanged, and again my roommate took to poking and jabbing me to get my attention. She again demanded to know how horrible this was, and I quietly said that I agreed…..and then my roommate got angry. She demanded to know why I wasn’t upset. She told me that her family’s not even from Europe and she’s a complete mess, and so being a Polish Jew I should be an even worse mess. I told her, “I AM upset.” But she refused to believe it, saying, “Well you don’t look it!” I didn’t look it, so therefore I couldn’t BE it.
I hate this.
You know what I need? I need a nerd. I need a nerd to hang out with—age/gender/race/religion/whatever is irrelevant. I’m accepting applications from now until the end of time, so here are the requirements if any of you think you fit the bill:
I need a quiet friend to sit with and to occasionally translate Latin with. If you don’t know Latin, that’s okay—as long as you want to learn it. I need someone who’s geeky, who likes TV and the internet. (And, on another note, I need a TV.) I need a friend who wouldn’t mind sitting on the top of the crusader ruins here and looking around at the view in silence for an hour—and the silence is interrupted only when the two of us simultaneously wonder out loud where the bathroom of the castle would have been. And then we get up and actually investigate the ruins because we honestly feel like we’re gonna figure it out. (And this is in spite of the fact that we both know damn well that people probably used chamber pots or some shit like that back then.)
I need a friend who understands that I’m just letting my imagination run wild—but also takes it seriously--when I say, “That building on that mountain over there is what I think Mount Olympus would look like if the Greek gods actually lived there,” and then the friend gets into an argument with me by suggesting, “No way! That place looks like G-d’s toaster!”
I need a friend I can sit with at Coffee Bean, and we can speculate on the lives of the people passing by. “That guy definitely has genital herpes.” “I bet that woman is having an extra-marital affair.” “That woman is probably a teacher, or maybe a social worker.” “That man grew up on a kibbutz.” We might argue or disagree on certain conclusions, but we’d both agree that the man over there is an aspiring journalist.
Unfortunately, there are no friends like that to be had at this place. Instead I’ve got party animals, men on the run from the law, aggressive weirdos, and Russians. For all I know, the Russians are sweet nerds—but I can’t understand a fucking word that comes out of their mouths, except, “Mah nishmah, SEMMY???”
Anyway, I’m accepting applications.
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