Napkin party

I woke up to my flat carpeted with crumpled and unfolded napkins. Malachite green napkins.

Last night to cool off the flat and avoid evil air conditioning, I opened all eleven windows on the three sides of my top-floor flat, and turned on the fan in the living room, and it was fresh and magical. Something near impossible to acheive in Haifa.

No thought was given to the stack of 250 green napkins piled in a neat pile in an African woven basket on the living room table.

I woke up twenty minutes ago to this amazing wind-arragement. In every corner of my flat, from my living room to my own bedroom, on the other side of the flat, and the corridor in between, were unfolded and crumpled napkins. Every single one of them was somewhere NOT on the table.

Now I’ve collected them in a disordered pile and I’m running out the door.

It was the softest mess I’ve ever seen. So soft and delicate, even groggy from waking up too early, it was still, so pretty…

Learning how to see

I keep finding out I’m illiterate in so many ways.

I’ve been taking a photo class for the past four weeks, and it has been an amazing experience to learn how to see. I found myself battling with a whole new alphabet, vocabulary, sentence structure and frame of reference that I had never given any thought to before, even though my whole life has been pivoting around light, color and beauty for so long. I look back now and realize a lot of important decisions I’ve made (such as moving to an inconvenient apartment) have been based on these concepts, but I only started studying them through this class, and it has opened up a new world to me.

Once you’ve battled and overcome the technicalities of shutter speed and aperture to get the effect you want and you start thinking of composition, or light, balance, movement, you are using a totally new part of your brain and the experience is very stimulating…

Class one: Composition

Class two: Movement

Class three: Light

“Paperwork is sacred! Without paperwork, you can’t do anything!”

I had to renew my French Passport.

Insert anything else after renew and it’s not such an ordeal. “my membership” “my marriage vows” “my liver” “committment to my work”. In this case it really felt more like “I have to renew my desire to actually want to be French enough to go through this crap.”

I’ve been trying to gather the documents I need for this for months now. I called a few times to get the details of what it is I needed and the lady with the raspy voice (I could smell the cigarette from the receiver) said:

-An original birth certificate of mine

-my old passport

-a copy of my mother’s birth certificate

-a copy of my mother’s “family booklet” including where it mentions she was born in France of French parents, where she married my father and the event of my birth

-326.10 NIS in cash and exact change

-six photos (“Absolutely no head covering allowed scarves or hats, after this 9/11 business and also, on a white background, please.”

Mom initially fed-exed this stuff to me for an arm and a leg from Congo but it never got here. So two weeks later I was talking to the guy in Jerusalem who denied the Israeli Post Office’s responsibility for tracking packages from Congo. He said that responsibility lay with the French post office. I should have known.

So she gathered her end of the papers and sent them to me with friends who were visiting. I went to get photos taken, with digital, it’s great because you can see your face and change fate, as opposed to living with a crappy photo for six to ten years. I tired a bunch of different stuff before settling for a half-smile, Mona Lisa like, which was infinitely more flattering than a teeth-bearing grin. I was quite happy with the result, actually. First time in my life, with ID photos.

So I went to the Consulate at 8 am this morning and was in the passport-renewal-guy’s office thirty seconds later. He looked at everything and then said: where’s your long-term visa for Israel? I ran up 257 steps back to my home, got the info, and came back down. I’m sitting in front of him again, hopeful. And he says, sorry. This is the wrong kind of visa, you’ll have to wait for the Vice Consul.

Half an hour passes. Vice Consul arrives with gym bag, shakes the hand of every person in the Consulate, and takes me up to his office where I sit in a very large black leather chair facing him accross a huge black glass-covered desk. He is sitting in an even bigger black leather chair. He tells me that I need an official letter stating how long I’ve been here, why I have the wrong visa. Etc.

After three phone calls (to clarify what they might need, what they want, and then what that means) to an angelic person who faxes that statement to the Consulate, the passport-renewal-guy is now entering all the data in the computer, one finger at a time. He said a few things about some of my certificates being out of date, but he would be nice and accept them, then asked why some of them which didn’t need to be notarized were notarized, stating the guy who notarized them was a real idiot…At this point I complained about paperwork, and he offered me the gem that I decided to title this post with.

Finally he gets me to stamp my left index finger on one of the forms, sign in three different places and tells me they’ll call me in two and a half months.

I am two centimeters shorter in my passport than I am in real life. And to get shorter on paper took two and a half hours of my morning and three months of getting the papers here, but only in two and a half months will I be able to prove my shortness to the French authorities.

In moments like this, particularly last year when I had to pay cash for a return ticket out of Israel before they would let me enter it, or when I think of people who are stuck in airports for ten years how international travel and personal documentation are going to change in the next decades. What will all this look like in fifty years?

I think it will be pretty much the same.

The Station Agent

Last good movie I saw…three days ago. I tried my hand at a short review but reading over it, it sounds like a very strange personal ad, although I’m not sure what for…:) Maybe I should stick to really long blog entries. But steer clear from medical discoveries, right Nathan? :)

Unpretentious story about an unlikely friendship between three people who make quite a motley crew. There are some great moments and an understated soundtrack, and you’ll find yourself at times even wishing you were living there, in New Jersey, with those people as your friends. And train chasing in a Cuban hot-dog truck. At least I did.

Anger in slow motion

Photo taken at a different time (but that conveys the mood of the story):

I have the ability to render men furious to the point of temporary insanity.

Let me clarify. By “men” I mean “Israeli taxi drivers” and by “temporary insanity” I mean so angry that they can’t drive straight and are cussing my unborn progeny.

Tonight was a classic V night. This is what I was carrying, to help you understand why I needed a cab home:

-My huge African-fabric laundry-bag (that looks like a drum case)

-one very large plastic bag containing shoes and more clothes

-my digital camera and case containing over two hundred photos for an attempt at capturing light

-my full purse (complete with a kaleidoscope, three notepads and a flashlight, an envelope containing all the papers needed for the renewal of my passport–which necessitates further explanation I’m too unable to provide at the moment, but, interestingly enough, NOT containing my cell phone, which I should carry with me in cases such as this, when I encounter psycho taxi drivers late at night)

-another bag containing the remainder of my meager dinner (untouched Kinder Bueno and some chips and tahina).

So I needed a cab. I was waiting for it with a friend and we were having a perfectly lovely, hilarious and balanced conversation about how much we hate laundry and the ways to avoid doing it (buying new clothes, or bitching incessantly about it until you feel absolutely no satisfaction and still in the end, have to do it).

The cab came and I very ungracefully, entered the slanted taxi (it stopped on a hill). And he started driving. Then I asked him to turn the meter on and he totally flipped.

Little aside: we are basically a community of English speakers living in Israel for somewhat short periods of time, so we don’t have time to learn the language (which is not the easiest to learn and requires a substantial investment of time to start learning) since we basically spend 24 hours a day either serving in an English speaking environment, or spending time with English speaking people.

Then you add to that the fact that most cab drivers quote you different prices and want to rip you off, and the fact that the meter gives you a standard price, and you get an 18% tax deduction for transportation with a receipt, using the meter is appealing and necessary. But they don’t pocket the money, and have to declare it. End aside.

He got so mad he started cussing at me, yelling so hard he couldn’t breathe and the taxi started swerving. Then he accelerated and was F-L-Y-I-N-G over the hill at record speed. I tuned off, my head tilted, looking through the window at the beautiful city, the Shrines, the gardens, the neighborhoods, the Carmelite monastery, completely calm.

He eventually stopped cussing and yelling and turned the radio way up, an amazingly beautiful song, a Hebrew ballad, that had the feeling of “Fields of Gold” sung by Eve Cassidy…so beautiful. That slow, enchanting music filling the taxi with its sound and us flying through the city at great speed was the most interesting experience.

I felt like I was at the end of some strange movie that would take place in New York City where everyone is disconnected from each other at the end and they all go their separate ways.

So I came home, wondering how I can do things differently to avoid angering someone this much next time, and figured it’s a process. I’ll figure it out eventually.

I hope I didn’t ruin his night by pissing him off that much.

Although it’s kind of strange to realize that you can do that to someone. Send them flying through the roof in anger. I was fine myself, I’ve gained a great ability to calm down in the face of absolute rage and it doesn’t affect me at all. I came home and put a bouquet of yellow flowers in front of my computer, and now I’m going to calmly look through my week’s photos.

But the flowers are beautiful. And the breeze is sweet.

Caffeinated Soap

Caffeinated Soap?

Blind French Canadian student denied entry to English classes at university because his seeing-eye dog is strictly francophone?

There are a lot of things that baffle me, like the recent $60 million dollar wedding or the Dubai hotel that costs $15,000 a night.

I guess Saturday morning is as good a time as any to think about stuff like this. In between doing my weekly weekend writing splurge, watching the Royal Tannenbaums sometime later today, cleaning my flat at some indefinite point. I admit I spend a lot of time collecting seemingly pointless strange articles and facts, and marveling at the ridiculousness of our world, but it’s my entertainment from constant thinking about things like a comprehensive system of education that truly educates and empowers children.

Or the role of parents in nurturing their children, something I don’t think people take quite seriously enough.

Or how the entire world is basically organized in every way possible to keep Africa poor by instantly engulfing the extraordinary wealth it produces and return a piddly percentage of that wealth back to the starving looted continent, disguising it as charity and aid.

Or how do you effect social change so that these poisonous catch-22 cycles of economic colonialism are reversed? Micro-finance? Women’s literacy? Youth Empowerment?

Or how do you use your talent if it is writing to make any kind of difference? I mean, aren’t qualified scientists and economists or social innovators really the people that make a difference? And if so, how do I become one of them? Or how do I have the courage to make the difference I can by staying true to who I am?

Sometimes I need to think about my friend’s walk in Uganda, when a kid popped up with a piece of paper and told him to hold still for his photo. And then proceeded to make an origami camera, complete with shutter. Or I need to plunge and lose myself in a thick book of perfect fiction, like the Poisonwood Bible, something I can squeeze for instant meaning or wallow in literary beauty. I need a perfect film, once in a while, like my M & M’s five minute home video about their trip to Venice set to hauntingly beautiful opera music. Gliding gondolas in rainy grey waters, an exquisite short story about voyage, where you bob along canals as the basilicas cloud over, and your eyes rest on beauty and the story of finding yourself.

So that’s why I’m all over the place, and more specifically, that’s why I’m here so often. Sometimes I just need to talk, because if I keep it all in, I feel like I’m going nuts.

And I love to hear from you, so keep commenting. It makes me feel less crazy for talking to myself… talking to myself.

18% grey

I just found out about this thing in photography called 18% grey. It was discovered by the folks at Kodak, so I’m not sure what that means, or even if I understand it well, but I like the idea in any case and I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days now.

Apparently, 18% grey is the perfect medium tone, which means that if you meter all your shots to it, they will all come out perfectly exposed. Of course they may in the end be out of focus, but this works out in my train of thought, because I think we all need to have our 18% grey, a set of values, or one value we particularly cannot live without, in helping us to meter our decisions to it.

Huge ugly cats and communal drinking cups.

Maybe the title of this post is a bit mis-leading. Both trips were actually A LOT OF FUN!!!

I went to the Druze Village because they’re such an interesting community and I was extremely curious about all the tall tales I’d heard of the place. And Massada really did totally shatter me. It was amazing. The Dead Sea was…salty, oily and muddy. Out of self-respect I haven’t posted any photos of the full-body mud masks-while-wearing-poofy-baggy-superman-blue-soccer-shorts. So in between all the photos, there was lots and lots of laughing, and cow-counting, and sun, and fun stuff. :)

Earthquake right at this moment in Haifa.

It is kind of cool to feel the earth move, but at the same time, it’s only cool because the ceiling is not falling on top of me. It’s only cool because devoid of the element of panic.

Yahoo! and Hotmail trivia

If you use either or both of these services, you’ve all probably wondered why they are called that. Don’t the names just seem kind of random? Or at least that “they” could have come up with something better? Someone just sent me the a one-liner about Yahoo! and just went online to find out the whole story about both. It’s actually interesting.

Yahoo!: The web site started out as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” but then became Yahoo! which is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. The creators insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo, as in Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.” (I still don’t believe them, they’re just trying to mask their nerdiness under fake literary pretenses)

Hotmail: Hotmail was commercially launched on July 4th, 1996, Independence Day of the USA, symbolically representing freedom from ISPs. When the creators came up with the business plan for the mail service, they tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “HTML” – the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing. (but the “selective upper casing” was dropped because it looked “selectively” (un)educated).