The one in which my blood pressure goes through the roof

A few months ago on this blog I wrote about a girl down the hall from me back at school screaming bloody murder alone in her room for an extended period of time. It was finals week and apparently the stress was a little too much for this girl to handle. Eventually the police were called and the girl was dragged off to an ambulance, and from there to psychological evaluations in a hospital.

Right now I identify 100 percent with that girl.

Now the army is telling me that I haven’t done my general doctor’s examination. Which I actually did back in August/July. In fact, last Monday when I turned in my blood test results I actually SAW in the hands of one of the soldiers the notes from that examination. But now apparently I haven’t done it.

I tried arguing with the girl on the phone that I had done it, and she just kept saying that according to the computer or my file or whatever that I had NOT done it. She was like, “Well obviously you HAVEN’T done it!” I really disliked her tone, which suggested that she couldn’t believe I was so stupid, so mistaken, that I could possibly think that I had undergone an examination when the computer said I hadn’t.

Look, I’m no computer, but I have a clear memory of sitting in my underpants in the medical exam room, and I remember carrying a cup of pee through a crowded building, and I remember getting a blood test in the army enlistment center. I’ve looked through the eye thing at the little farmhouse, and I’ve handed a fat Russian woman a doctor’s form. I wish I could tell the computer that…

I wanted to reach through the phone and throttle her, and yell, “WELL OBVIOUSLY YOUR FUCKING COMPUTER IS MISTAKEN, YOU RANCID BITCH!” But I didn’t. Not because of concerns of politeness, but rather because technology is not yet advanced enough to allow hands to go through the receiver to throttle the person on the other end of the line. So instead I just sort of pathetically pleaded that I had in fact already done the test. It actually got to the point where I was so frustrated that I couldn’t stop myself from reverting to my Los Angeles-born/bred self and ended up spewing out Hebrew mixed with “like”s instead of saying “Uh” or “Um” when thinking. “Aval ani like cvar asiti et col ha…like….bdikot! Zeh like mamash mtaskel!”

When I hung up the phone….I can’t even describe my frustration. I don’t even know if frustration would be the correct word. It was sort of an unholy combination of frustration, sadness, anger, fear, confusion, and indignation. Unfortunately, I don’t think English has a concise word for that emotion. All I know is, apparently the army got sick of finding new frustrating things for me to do, so they decided that having me re-do EVERYTHING would work just as well.

Whatever this emotion was, it made me sit on the floor crying like a baby…but an angry baby. A baby that had had enough and wanted to break things. I seriously just want to let loose a primeval scream, so loud that even the Jordanians will get shivers down their spines.

I then decided that I was so sick of people and dealing with their bureaucracies that I was simply going to run off into the mountains and live as a hermit.

Eventually I pulled myself together and remembered that the woman who came to speak to us in the absorption center about the army said that we should feel free to call her. She said she’d prefer that we try to deal with things directly with the army enlistment center hotline, but she said that if we ran into major problems that we should call her. And, well, I figured that being told test-by-test that I have to do everything over again was a sufficient reason to call her. So I did, and it turns out she’s out for a while, but someone else on the line said that I did NOT have to do the doctor exam over again…..

Which is reassuring, because now I don’t have to re-do things, but which kind of concerns me because I’m wondering how I can call two different people within the same hour and be told the exact opposite from each.

The nice girl on the other end of the line said she’d figure out what the problem is for me and then call me back. Hopefully she’s being honest….As of right now, I haven’t gotten a call back, but I only called 30 minutes ago. I’m still hopeful.

I was hoping to enlist immediately after ulpan, but now I’m concerned I won’t be in uniform even before the turn of the next century. I have a feeling that Moshiach will come before I enlist, and that Jesus has a better chance of coming back for Round 2 than I do of ever starting my army service.

I’m reluctant to start saying to myself, “Oh, this would never happen back in the U.S.”

But, let’s face it: it wouldn’t.

Any American friend I’ve related my saga to has said something to the effect of, “That would NEVER happen in the US Army! Basically all you have to do there is sign your name and you’re off to Iraq.” One American friend likened the difficulty of getting sent to Iraq by the US Army to that of sneezing. It is, however, completely optional as there is no draft in the US (at the moment).

Yet somehow with the Israeli army….they tell me I MUST serve for 2 years, but then they make me spend like 5 years simply finishing the fucking paperwork to get in. Which, in my opinion, is quite possibly the rudest thing you can do to someone. Why? Because meanwhile I can’t go back to school in Israel and can’t really do anything productive, because I’m constantly in a state of waiting for the fucking army. It’s just a rude fucking waste of my life. If you’re going to tell me that I HAVE to do the army for 2 years, which means that I can’t do anything important or long-term in Israel until after I finish those two years, could you please stop losing my forms/results/etc and just let me join ASAP?

Fucking hell…

Okay, so the woman called me back. Turns out I have to do 10 Blood Pressure Tests. Which no one told me about. Okay, whatever. I asked her, “Is this the LAST thing I have to do?” And she said that as long as there wasn’t something horribly wrong with my blood pressure that this would be the last thing. I hope she’s right.

This is really frustrating. My whole life, one of the few things that has NOT been a problem with my blood was blood pressure. Sure, I may have extra shit floating around in my blood that shouldn’t be there, but blood pressure? That’s maybe the one normal thing about me.

Who knows though…after all this shit from the army maybe now I have really high blood pressure. Every single time I interact with the army enlistment center I feel like an aneurysm waiting to happen.

I can also imagine the conversation when I go into my health clinic tomorrow and ask to do 10 blood pressure tests (I have to go on 10 separate occasions), without a form from the army, and they’ll tell me something like, “You don’t have a form? What, you think you can just walk in here and do whatever blood pressure tests you want?”

At which point my blood pressure will spike as I scream, “JUST DO ME A GODDAMN FAVOR, YOU BUREAUCRATIC SHITBAGS!”

Just in case, I’ve made a playlist on my iTunes called “Blood Pressure.” I plan to listen to it every morning when I go get my blood pressure tested, and it will consist entirely of calming country music, slow Christian rock, acoustic classics, Enya, and also pretty much anything popular with stoners.

Hearing that I just had to do blood pressure tests made me cry. Because it’s something so fucking simple (except it takes 10 days at least), yet the millions of times I’ve called the army center in the past couple weeks, none of them told me to do it. It’s just been sort of a shit couple weeks in general, as I’ve also been upset about something totally unrelated, and so I guess adding everything up made me cry.

Oh fuck it, my roommate just came in and made some comment about the mess on my corner of the room. She doesn’t tell me to clean it up, but she says something about how it must bother ME and how it must be difficult for ME to live like that for 5 months. She says it with this sort of false air of concern for me. Bitch please, compared to how I live when I’m in a room of my own, this is NOTHING. Plus, I hate this tactic. If it bothers her, which I’m guessing it does, she should say so. I don’t like her telling me what bothers me. I know what bothers me, not her. And you know what? Mess doesn’t bother me. And secondly, it’s my fucking corner of the room, the one corner she hasn’t taken over with her own shit, and I feel that I should get to do whatever I like with it. I am, however, extremely neat in the kitchen and bathroom, which are 100 percent shared.

Normally I make some sort of apology and immediately jump up and at least make a show of sort of moving things around. Today I guess she expected the same of me…but today I didn’t really feel like making a show of trying to appease her. She waited in the doorway for me to jump up and do as I normally do, with this bossy and kind of nasty expression on her face, but after spending the last 30 minutes crying—and my roommate can see that my eyes are still red and puffy—I didn’t really feel like obliging anybody but myself, so I sat. At my computer. Without taking off my headphones. And gave her the stink eye. She maintained her eye contact. But I maintained my stink eye. And she retreated! VICTORY!!!

Oh G-d did it feel good.

I will say that I love having a good laugh after crying. After pondering the idea of Mess, I tried to think of the messiest/least hygienic thing I’ve ever done in my life, the thought of which made me laugh hysterically at how appalled my roommate would be. The winning act? During high school my best friend and I both forgot to pack lunch and were quite hungry. So we wandered around campus until we came across a piece of cake that had been abandoned, thrown on the ground, and trampled upon. My friend and I just looked at each other, and then together without a word sat down to eat the cake off the floor. WINNER!