Party of the Proof

Dear Readers:

First of all, this weekend I really want to learn the Thriller dance. I feel like I say that every weekend, but this weekend I am going to make a serious commitment.

ALSO:

My roommate scares the shit out of me. Granted, she’s a very sweet girl, very concerned with my well-being, and has a very charming sense of humor.

When she’s asleep, however, she turns into a French Demon.

So last night I had a particularly disturbing dream that I was visiting my Catholic brother—or actually his grave—at Har Herzl.* And so sometime in the wee hours of the morning when it was still very dark out I woke up from this dream and had the typical reaction, you know, where you stare bug-eyed at the ceiling and hope desperately to G-d that you fall back asleep quickly so that you can dream about something else and forget the unpleasantness, but at the same time you’re afraid to go back asleep in case the dream picks up where it left off.

*Which, for those of you who don’t know, is a military cemetery here in Jerusalem.

Anyway, I’m lying there in this state of uneasiness, alone in the dark feeling a tad creeped out when all of the sudden I hear someone calling out—no, YELLING—in French:

“YEAH, WELL, WHY DON’T YOU ASK HER WHAT SHE DID!”

The volume was incredible. The Arabs in the neighborhoods around this building were probably roused from their sleep, then probably screamed something back, but we didn’t hear it because even Arabs don’t have the same kind of projection that my roommate has.

Needless to say, when you’re awake in the middle of the night after a particularly unpleasant dream, someone suddenly screaming in French is enough to completely make your heart stop. So then instead of just being freaked out by a dream about my Catholic brother being dead (and buried in an Israeli military cemetery no less!), now I’m freaked out because my roommate is HEATED about something. I didn’t know if she was angry at me or if she was angry at someone else, and so I sat there stewing in my panic for another few seconds when suddenly an even louder explosion of French came spewing out of my roommate:

“MOM, YOU ALWAYS HELP *HER*.”

I then realized that she was talking to her mom. I thought maybe she was on the phone in bed, but it would also be ridiculously late/early in France, where her mom was.

The screaming continued, and she was basically yelling at her mom about child-favoritism issues and whatnot (stuff that she’s brought up with me before…when she wasn’t in bed, and when she wasn’t screaming though).

It was really dark so I couldn’t see too well, but I realized that she wasn’t really moving. Normally when my roommate is on the phone and yelling at someone, she moves A LOT. Like, she paces and throws her arms and whatever. But here she was almost perfectly still.

Curious, I turned on my cell phone light and shone it in the direction of my roommate: her eyes were completely shut and her cell phone was on the ground next to her bed, completely shut-off.

Yes, dear readers, my roommate until June screams angrily in perfect, clear, understandable French IN HER SLEEP!

This isn’t the first time she’s done it, but this is the first time I could actually understand it perfectly and that she didn’t sound partially asleep. This time she sounded perfectly awake, which makes it even creepier.



On a completely different thought: I feel like I need to address the issue of elections. Look, I love Israel dearly, but this whole system of electing a government is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever witnessed. Like, sure I’m sad Obama won since I’m a Republican, but there was something comforting about knowing by 10 pm on election day who the next leader of my country would be, whether I liked the answer or not. Like, BAM, DONE, CASE CLOSED. Let’s move on to something more interesting.

In this country however? They can’t even publish the exit poll results until 10 pm. That is the law (at least for this election). So basically for most of the day you have no idea what’s going on. And then finally the exit poll results come out, and then they say that the leader of the party that got the most votes (Kadima, led by Tzipi Livni) might not even end up being Prime Minister cos she has to form a coalition, whatever the fuck that means. So it might turn out that the party leader who came in second (Netanyahu, leading Likud) will be Prime Minister, but that’s on the assumption that he can form a coalition. So here it is, the afternoon AFTER election day, and I’m no more sure about who’s going to be the next leader of this country than I was about who’ll be the next president the day BEFORE election day in the U.S.

And I still haven’t figured out what the President of Israel does. Is he kind of like the Queen of England, except for Israel? Is his job just to look nice and clean at state functions?

Also, I can’t figure out the ballot system. My understanding is that here instead of a ballot they have these slips of paper that you put into an envelope, and each party has like 1, 2 or 3 Hebrew letters that symbolize their party and these are printed on ballot slips. When you go to vote you put a slip of paper from the party you want into an envelope. And fine, if you don’t want a paper ballot that you punch holes in, whatever, but I don’t understand why you couldn’t just put in slips of paper that say your party’s name. I’m not sure what מחל has to do with Likud or what כן has to do with Kadima. I find that system so confusing, because then not only does the party feel the need to publicize its name and its leader’s name, but it also has to waste time reminding people what its letters are. Why can’t they just have slips of paper that say simply “Likud” or “Kadima” on them (except in Hebrew obviously)? Cos if you can’t read your party’s name in Hebrew, maybe you shouldn’t be voting at all.

Then there’s the whole issue of the fact that they actually let anti-Zionist parties and anti-Israel parties into our parliament…like, can you imagine that shit flying in the U.S. for even just one second? …… but that’s a rant that warrants a book all on its own….

Also, I’m starting my own political party:
Mifleget HaHokhakhah (Party of the Proof).



Fuck. Fuck. We just had a talk from people from the Lishkat Giyus. They talked a lot about how you get assigned to your job/unit/whatever, which is good because I had no idea how that works. Now I’m all freaked out about doing my last medical exam there and then getting told which things would be open to me….and getting a draft date. Fuck I hope it’s sooner rather than later, because I don’t want to have to go out into the Israeli working world yet…

I’m scared of being told about what jobs would be open to me, because I’m afraid that being my ill-informed self I’ll unintentionally make the worst possible choice. But I’m even more afraid that they’re only going to give me a tiny list of choices, all of which I hate. I don’t know what would be worse, finding out later that you accidentally fucked yourself over when you unknowingly chose a shit job over a good job, or getting fucked over by someone else by only being offered shit jobs.

And then part of me is kind of glad that I didn’t grow up here and that I don’t know what’s “better” than other things or what’s “worse” than other jobs. For example, it would not have occurred to me that “everyone hates the military police” had not several people told me. Maybe I’ll end up joining a unit that supposedly sucks or everyone hates or whatever, and I’ll end up completely enjoying it because it never occurred to me that it was SUPPOSED to suck.