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!