what people do with their lives

Someone else’s life.

I find it simultaneously daunting and crippling to find out about other people’s courageous lives.

I’m sure everyone feels the same..but when you find out about someone who is your age or younger and has published a best-selling life-changing novel, saved refugee camps, already had your dream career and excelled at it, and moved on (or in this case–died)…it is kind of a depressing/exhilarating feeling.

This photojournalist was also an extremely talented mixed-media artist and created personal journals (seventeen of them at the time of his death by stoning in Somalia, at the age of 22) that are touching, riveting, sensual, passionate, brilliant. His mother compiled pages from them in a hard-cover book called “The Journey is the Destination: the Journals of Dan Eldon”.

There are some annoyingly-flash-powered samples of his journals on the site. Worth a look, really.

This guy is really, for me, an ideal, in a way. A fantasy. I fancy that there are these individuals who walk around the same earth we do, but seem to not be limited or bound by the same laws. As if gravity didn’t somehow apply to certain people, or the need for visas, or mundane obligations.

At the age of 14, he started photo-journalism. At seventeen, he was interning for a magazine in New York, that same year he raised money for the hospital bills of a girl in Kenya through various ingenious and creative ploys. At nineteen, he drove down from Kenya to Mozambique and found a refugee camp he vowed to aid, then raised money for that cause. Around 20, he found out about rampant famine in the north of Somalia and was single-handedly responsible for bringing it to the attention of the world through his photos. He was stoned to death at 22 when trying to help document a popular uprising.

That’s what I mean…some people live in this world but are not bound by it. I think of all of us as plants, we all have roots, but some of us are firmly rooted in soil, immovable, stuck to one place, and grow upwards because that’s what we do. Some of us have roots but are freed from our environment, are UP-rooted, held triumphantly above ground, defying the laws of rooted-ness, overtaking walls, buildings, houses with our luxuriant vines, growing over water, over rock.

There are so many options for life. And I find myself yearning for a life infused with courage and daring, but not sure how to free myself from everything I tie myself down to. I just want to uproot myself and live the life I would love to live. Live a life I can admire.

on being a woman, sometimes

I was planning on writing about “different kinds of cinema” since I just walked out of this incredible Zhang Yimou movie called “House of the Flying Daggers” with some of the most high quality cinematography (although a lot of it was –I’m assuming purposely–over-exposed), most beautiful actors and actresses, drop-dead gorgeous costumes, incredible fighting scenes (especially a Bamboo fighting sequence that is unrivalled), and some other things.

But then I walked home and encountered something much more mundane but real.

I had to walk in between a group of three guys. And nothing makes me feel more like a vulnerable girl than that. I hate that. I HATE IT. Why do they do that? They always put themselves in narrow passageways or staircases where you have to literally squeeeeze past them. Do women do this at 9 PM at night too but I just don’t see them? I don’t think so but I’m open to the suggestion that I’m making it all up.

There are so many, SO many incredible men out there that completely make up for these minute experiences. So many men who are sensitive, caring, kind, compassionate, service-oriented, helpful, non-aggressive. And I know a lot of them, so I count myself lucky.

But there really are moments when I don’t know if I am just carrying around such a huge chip on my shoulder that I interpret situations through the monumental chip.

I really hurts.

I was just walking down the stairs, happy, thinking of the movie, I had just kung-fu WHIRLED my apple core into a trash can like the heroine of the movie would have, and twirled around in success, and I was smelling all the amazing smells of mimosa, fragrant flowers and blossoming trees that line that particular staircase that make my evening walk so incredibly pleasant, and I was really, just happy. And then I walked past them and felt so embarrassed and vulnerable and kept my head down, and walked past them fast.

I had no reason to, right? they were just three guys, just hanging out near their homes…and they didn’t mean any harm.

I live in a wonderful family neighborhood. It’s really lovely, and everyone is hanging out of their balconies at all hours of the night, smoking nargila pipes, nursing babies, having conversations, turning lights on and off.

But I just reacted by assumption. I guess I just have traveled enough alone from New York’s Port Authority to Abidjan to know that you just have to be cautious, if you’re a woman alone. But you know…just once, walking home from a movie not so late at night, I would just like to be carefree and not have to be cautious.

Maybe other women are different and can walk with their head up high in front of men they don’t know. I always expect comments from them. I always find myself slightly surprised if they don’t make comments or clicking sounds or whistles or something. Young boys do it from the age of 10, 9…and younger ones even are there just watching them, soaking up the example of what you have to do when a girl alone walks by you.

When I walk alone past a group of young boys, I instantly start looking past them or down or away, to detract attention from me, but the comments often come. When they don’t come, I notice.

If it’s crowded, if I’m walking with other girls, or with other people, it doesn’t happen. So it’s not unbearable. It’s not all the time.

But I really think that what you believe has very real consequences in the world, because you take actions based on those beliefs.

And I’ve always felt like the equality of men and women is a spiritual truth, but as a reality, it is far, far removed from our world, and I feel like it will be a long time yet before true equality is seen in this world.

But I expect inequality. I expect that if I am walking alone I will be treated differently than if I were walking with a man. So…isn’t my expectation of this inequality (and I mean inequality in treatment, not intrinsic inequality) and every other woman’s expectation of this inequality part of the problem?

If we (or a large portion, or even, what the heck, assuming we’re just a few, a minority of us) believe that we will be treated differently because we’re women, aren’t we then participating in fueling that prejudice?

I have been working on a personal project lately, the project of not having assumptions. It sounds vague and it’s not. And I’m not going to explain it because I tend to go on too many tangeants. But what if…I had no assumption about being treated differently because I’m a woman. Would I find that that embarrassment I felt walking past those guys was largely my own construct.

Maybe.

And that’s all well, but that’s not the issue, really. I can start working on my end of this, and apply my zero-assumption project to this case, as well. But the issue is, how did it get there in the first place?

How did that concept get inside of me?

I guess I always thought equality was one of those concepts like human nobility which you kind of have internalized de facto, but I’m starting to realize that to see equality and nobility, and lack of prejudice in the world, you have to flush out what remains inside your heart from the old world and grow those qualities from the seed that is already in your heart. Nurture it every day, taking care of your inner life and your purity of heart.

And it’s not about the equality of women to men. It’s about the nobility of man too. If I assume those guys are going to jeer, I’m working on a negative assumption about other creatures of God. So I’m not the only victim here. I’m actually dragging these poor guys into something they probably just don’t need.

Purity of heart is my favorite concept at the moment. It is so much more than being a goody-two-shoes, so much more than “not having bad thoughts”, so much more than “having pure thoughts”.

Purity of heart is your key to nobility. Everything starts with purity of heart. Baha’u'llah says:

“O Son of Spirit!

My first counsel is this: Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart, that thine may be a sovereignty ancient, imperishable and everlasting”

I’ve spent the better part of these past twelve months thinking about purity of heart. I have a hard time with meditation, mysticism, prayer…but I do well with thinking and over-analyzing. I told a friend the other day, if I had to be a super-hero, my super-power would be to over-analyze (and to estimate capactiy, but that’s another story).

And this is what I’ve come to.

Purity of heart is the essential pre-requisite.

In so many prayers and writings it appears as the initial necessary condition. It requires effort on one hand, diligence, daily striving, hard w-o-r-k, but at the same time, you can ask for help when you need it most (“Create in me a pure heart, O my God”).

A pure heart is one that will not blind you, a heart that will not let you operate on assumption. (“He (the true seeker) must before all else cleanse his heart, which is the seat of the revelation of the inner mysteries of God (…) He must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love incline him blindly to error or hate repel him from the truth.”).

A pure heart is like a mirror, that will reflect the truth. Most often, I’ve come across references to purity of heart that are next to references about error, assumptions, bad judgement. It seems like we operate on faulty premises, and if your premises are faulty, then all your efforts are doomed to fail, right? So a pure heart is where it starts.

Imagine a world where we had no assumptions about each other, each others’ intentions, no assumptions about reality, or how a situation really is. No assumptions about how something will be when it happens, or no assumptions about what lesson we are to learn from this and that experience.

Everyone says they don’t have assumptions. Everyone also says they don’t regret anything. I don’t buy either. I’ve said both enough to realize I’m trying to prove something by over-emphasis.

Trying not to make assumptions is almost a pointless project, really. It’s so difficult to un-earth. You realize that so many things aren’t the way you thought they were, and it makes the little world you had constructed around you all of a sudden a lot less predictable. Not a very comfortable situation to find yourself in, day after day.

But it’s very empowering, and it renews your faith in God, people, almost yourself.

The trick isn’t to replace negative assumptions with positive ones, but just to try and remove assumptions from your mental mode altogether (I, for one, NEVER thought I would use the phrase mental mode in a sentence).

I’m not kidding. I grew up going to French schools were being pessimistic was synonymous with being realistic. But being overly optimistic is not the solution either.

You have to strive for purity of heart, then, I think, only then, you have a shot at glimpsing truth. Or reality. True reality?

the Cathedral of dreams

(this is an essay written about a black and white photograph taken by Negeen Sobhani, of a cathedral in a street of Florence)

Timeless.

Any epoch, any era, any moment in the past five hundred years, that is what recorded memory is for, to remind you of what happened, and what is possible, still, in waking dreams where you let your thoughts wander.

There is a moment when a particular image crosses that tenuous line between your personal memory and an appropriated past. Then you cannot decipher in the recesses of your own tumultous mind if you experienced it, or if you appropriated the memory after countless retellings, and reminescences.

The street in Firenze is sharp, busy but not hectic, and the clock indicates four in the afternoon. A man with his hands in his pockets takes a step away from me, his left heel barely touching the ground and I close my eyes…when I open them again, he has gone, and the sun lays its last rays along the side of the buildings on the left-hand side of the street, missing the bar, carressing the bakery and the butchershop and the shoe cobbler, further down a group of men shrink into the intersection and above all the awnings of the narrow busy street with the skinny four-story builings on either side, towering in the haze, is the Cathedral of dreams.

Looming quietly over a carefully synchronized chaos, she is the calm center, the heart to the artery I’m standing on. Powerful, magestic, gigantic, and yet practically invisible to those who won’t lift their head. The basilica, hazy with dreams, fades into the white sky above and I turn over, blinking, dreaming now of blintzes.

And as quickly as that, the snapshot vanishes. The perfect moment in time in the city I’ve never visited, and the stranger in mid-step whom I will never meet, the wet road and caressing rays of the afternoon sun disappear under a blanket of eastern European pancakes that I’ve never tasted.

Ghost car in the valley of Ba’ha

From a photoshoot in Haifa and Akka with Anisa

Weirdest band name ever:

I miss those skies!

Building in Haifa before our sherut to Akka:

Playing by the sea gate:

At the market:

Kids jumping off the (very high) sea wall into the Mediterranean:

Skylights with no ladders

I don’t question how my brain works.

Other people do, but that’s just because they’re not inside. Except, sometimes, at some isolated points, for the people who read this funny business. To me, my brain is a multi-media fun-factory, an amazing, powerful decoder that sifts the world, allows me to experience and feel it through all my senses (to the point where I have to remind myself that I am not just covered in senses and emotions, because everything just affects me) and then express it in words, mostly but sometimes also images (I’m still working on that).

I like it like this. I can produce non-sequiturs in conversations that make people ridicule me, and still be a fundamentally logical person, which none but my closest friends can see.

The thing is that sometimes I’m trying to process so much of the world at once (the people, the beauty, the light, my dreams, conversations, words) that my experience of it just comes out in shards of strangeness, like saying “I want to learn Yiddish ” Often, I just don’t realize I do it out loud…and sometimes I even feel I have to apologize for it, but that’s not right either, because, hehe, in the end, it just slows me down.

Right now, my life is in this intense period of absorption, and I’m going to need a couple of weeks to just sit there and have the whole experience just sink in because right now, I just don’t know what hit me. I feel like I have so much to share I just want to be exploring it constantly. I need ten web sites. One for each thing. I feel guilty very often that I even have this one. There are so many things, five this last week, that I post and then un-post, late at night, because they’re too personal. Meditations on beauty, charisma, sex-appeal, self-image, things that I feel too personally about to put on a blog that I am still exploring.

I feel bad that I don’t put up discussions of current issues, “my take on the news” or some such thing, but then there are so many people that do it obsessively, real news junkies, there are so many news web sites, I couldn’t hold a candle to them.

I just need to express what I feel now, and my three-legged duck is a sky-light for others into my eyes, my way of looking at the world, and my sky-light into the person I know I am, but am not really in touch with right now, because I’m at such an intense point.

This all seems very self-centered, another thing I beat myself up about, but really, so are all blogs. Maybe in the end, that’s a bad thing. Maybe it’s not. Maybe I should just give myself a break…

I’ve been hanging onto this idea of a skylight all afternoon.

We all need a skylight, something to helps us face ourselves, mostly, but also the world that we have to navigate in, our own little captains of an uncertain ship. So many decisions, so many interactions, so many judgements.

This can be one skylight for me, art is another, beauty. I never realized how heavily I rely on art to soothe and protect me, it’s the peel of my banana, I wish I had a recordings of my laugh and chuckle to insert where they happen. Right now it would be a tired chuckle, of me imagining myself as a very large banana, encased in a nice thick peel. Minus the overwhelming scent that would accompany such a large banana.

I try to surround myself with more and more beauty to make my experience of the world more livable. But maybe my experience of the world would be more peaceful if I could find a way of living more simply, maybe I am complicated my life for nothing.

I tried to “simplify” once, but it was very simple-minded. I ran into someone once who never carries anything but his one key to his flat. He responded to my incessant questioning about “But don’t you ever need to write anything down?” “Don’t you ever just take OFF and need something?” by saying that maybe I should try it, and maybe I was complicating my life more than necessary, by always having such a large purse full of things like a flashlight, a worry-stone, a spray bottle, lipstick, a USB cable, a Palm Pilot, two notebooks, three pens, food…I almost sat there, in the middle of the alley contemplating how vastly different his life was from mine from this one detail.

So I tried it for four days. No large bag containing everything in the world, just keys and a wallet. And I was so miserable. It wasn’t more simple. It was more complicated.

At the moment, though, I use beauty to make life happier, more beautiful…I found it hard to live here until I moved to a very inconvenient (200 stairs down into a neighborhood with no public transportation, five flights of stairs up–80 stairs no elevator) two-bedroom flat that is so beautiful, white, clean and airy, my sparkling castle in the sky. I found it hard to handle the responsibilities of my job until I brought in a huge book of black and white photographs, and some African art.

Those details made a world of difference to me.

Beauty is one of the most important things for me…I am so moved by it, and cherish it so much. It was my first experience of religion, of the sanctity of nature, of the love of God. I remember my grandmother opening worlds upon worlds of beauty to me in the summers in Auvergne, in her house full of antique treasures, a converted happy mess of a nineteenth-century farm, she would take me by the hand and let me discover the miracles of nature, her way of worshipping God, butterflies hibernating, four-leaf clovers in the wild, edible mushrooms, the jaw of a wild boar, natural sparkling springs, wild chamomile, and so many things that I treasure in my heart like so many beating wings of so many precious butterflies, fluttering with pleasure and magic.

Nature was God manifested for my grandmother, the most amazing person I’ve ever met. Respecting the miracle of Nature was her way of loving God, and she was the most pious and earnest person I’ve ever met. If only I could be one hundredth of the grand-daughter she deserved. One hundredth the non-judgmental, magical, loving, open, spiritual, happy, strong woman that she was.

God help me, I try though…Oy Vey. As they say…

I’m smiling now, through the skylight of my memory, something I just want to bask in and wrap myself in, my own memory, my own fabricated happiness, the world I weave with words I own. Something, anything, everything, too much, a little bit.

I’m counting on points for effort, because I look back and see many broken pots and so few victories, I don’t know how to face tomorrow sometimes. I climb in and out of certainty as if it were a dressing room for a dress I’m not convinced is “the one”. And all I really want is that certainty, that certitude.

How do I get there from here?

That’s the guiding question of my life. How do I get there from here?

There’s no journey more terrifying than the one you have no map for, especially for someone who has a good sense of direction and who enjoys being in control. No journey more destabilizing than the one where your destination is completely unknown. This is one of those topics that is impossible to cap, and I’ll start rambling beyond help in a minute, so I should just put the lid on it now, the night is young and I can do many beautiful things still.

My favorite flowers have always been the wild ones, that grow in the shade of moist woods, and that people pass by, because they’re too small to notice. I’ve often seen myself as those, for so many reasons that are too telling to share, but I’ve always been incredibly moved by them, they seem like the essence of a flower, all the variations, all the color, all the beauty, in such a small, intense, compacted form…so precious and so invisible.

I always loved the Forget-me-not, it’s name a little plea to eternity and the passerby and once, I was reading this book on famous Baha’i heroines and read this passage by Keith Ransom-Kehler, shortly before she died in Isphahan:

“I have fallen, though I never faltered. Months of effort with nothing accomplished is the record that confronts me. If anyone in future should be interested in this thwarted adventure of mine, he alone can say whether near or far from the seemingly impregnable heights of complaisance and indifference, my tire old body fell. The smoke and din of battle are to-day too dense for me ascertain whether I moved forward or was slain in my tracks. Nothing in the world is meaningless, suffering least of all. Sacrifice with its attendant agony is a germ, an organism. Man cannot blight its fruition as he can the seeds of earth. Once sown it blooms, I think forever, in the sweet fields of eternity. Mine will be a very modest flower, perhaps like the single tiny forget-me-not, watered by the blood of Quddus that I plucked in the Sabz-i-Maydan of Barfurush; should it ever catch the eye, may one who seems to be struggling in vain garner it in the name of Shoghi Effendi and cherish it for his dear remembrance.”

And now I have nothing left to say. Finally. It is all quiet.

Ode to 2 AM

Such a perfect time of night.

It’s quiet because the late hour has gotten the better of most people, and those who are still awake either have to be or want to be, so the hour feels more willfull than any other.

The opposite of 2 AM would have to be 8 AM, because everyone just has to be awake at that time, and if you’re not, it’s almost as if you’re lazy, because you should be. Everyone else is.

8 AM is the equivalent of “If your friends all jumped off a bridge, well, so would you because you have to, and if you don’t you might get fired, or at least reprimanded.”

2 AM is more like “No one is still awake to jump off a bridge now, so who cares? And if someone is jumping, they’re ‘flying solo’ at this point, so of COURSE I’m not going to join them.”

8 AM is like cod liver oil or antibiotics or multi-vitamins or drinking 8 glasses of water. Obligation.

2 AM is like melted chocolate. Luxury. Choice.

I like everything at 2 AM. The noises of the street sound more exotic, the little vespa speeding down below is going somewhere more interesting, the ambulance is more tragic, the conversations more solemn. I notice the violet-scented nargila smoke waft in through the window in our bathroom from the lit balcony below our flat. Distant crickets in the concrete jungles, poems unraveling through the cracks of the city below.

The past day unraveling into the next day, in an hour that belongs to neither. 2 AM is the no-man’s land that belongs to neither yesterday nor tomorrow, it’s the time when I feel more alive because I feel no one else is. Except for the driver of the super-fast red car (I know it was red) that just flew to the other end of the city.

2 AM is the winning hour, the black hole where time is worth more and the seconds and minutes are slowed, it is the secret to getting an inch out of a mile for me because I’m tottering at the edge of wakefulness and slumber, vacillating, swinging, not quite conscious but not unconscious. And it’s before 3 and 4 AM which I don’t particularly like at all, and after 11 PM to 1 AM which are very productive for me, I think faster during those hours. 2 AM comes kind of like a break, like the surf receding from the beach after the wave.

It feels like the International Date Line. I feel like that reporter that just wears Hawaiian shirts and white anti-sunburn cream on his nose and moved to a small island on the International Date Line so he can straddle the line between yesterday and today and play tricks on his mind that no one else cares about.

It’s the identity crisis of the day when you always wonder why it matters that all those trees fall in the forest making a soundless sound, heard by no one.

2 AM is as far away as you can get from 8 AM. So much further away from it than the six hours that separate them.

Maybe that’s what it feels like for people who are growing apart. They’re still so close, and have so much in common, but they’re already so far apart.

2 AM is slipping away. Time to end the Ode.

Gefilte fish and lust

The edge of understanding is simply dizzying. That moment, at which you start to understand something, when the veil is being lifted from something that previously was either confusing or simply unknown, is the very moment that you step over that edge, that precipice and fall faster. Into understanding, but at the same time, into something a little scary.

That’s how it’s always felt for me, when I start to understand something, things move much more quietly but also at a dizzying speed, like particle acceleration. All of a sudden, things rush past me, or maybe it’s me rushing past them, and I realize what I had never understood at the same time as I grasp the implications of this new bit of knowledge, and how it fits into my life, and I can so clearly see now, in that perfection that is hindsight, how that crucial piece of information or understanding was missing from my life before.

It’s almost like watching a glass drop, when you know where it has to go. I can’t explain it. I have the best reflexes for falling objects. I always catch them and avert a breakage or a just jinx gravity–I fancy it as one of my three superpowers. That, perfectly estimating what will fit where (capacity, I suppose) and blowing things out of proportion–But sometimes, even when I could easily use my mundane super-prowess and catch an object, I just tilt my head and everything becomes quiet and things just pan out…and I let the object fall with the assurance I know where it will fall, and that it has to fall.

That’s what happened with my favorite blue glass vase a few months ago. I could have caught it, but I just let it drop, from the edge of my irregular marble countertop, in my beautiful vast kitchen with the sea-green tiles and the hard white ceramic floor. It was a sunny afternoon, late, and I just wanted the blue glass vase to fall, without being caught so that it could be even more beautiful, shattered on the perfectly white floor with the sun shining in the late afternoon, hitting the shards of glass. Admittedly that’s just…strange. Perhaps, but it was so beautiful, and so perfect.

I was sweeping up the shards of glass for weeks afterward. But still, it was worth it.

So sometimes it’s like that with people. That’s the nice thing about getting older, you sometimes just shut up and watch, resisting that old temptation to help, or jump in or interfere, or even just defend yourself…as if you could really always have an effect. Sometimes, it’s better to let things run their course.

Sometimes, it’s like that with books–for me, it’s only ever been like that with music once, with Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” and some of Maria Callas’ solos–where you see the story unfold to a point where everything is perfect, and irreversible, and the characters will take that plunge. And it’s too real, sometimes, but with books, you get to shut the book when you’ve had enough.

It’s interesting that this is happening to me with “Jephte’s Daughter”, a book by Naomi Ragen. Strange. It’s sort of a love story, I suppose, of sorts, between two unbearably beautiful Orthodox Hassidic Jews. An arranged marriage and the slow undoing of what I can only suppose is the both of them. It’s so interesting, so fascinating to read this in context. The rituals of Judaism, the millenia of rituals surrounding food and hygiene, the hundreds of details governing marriage, law, daily life, their understanding of sex, lust, appetite, marriage, family roles, the strict regimen of daily life-long arduous study…are all at the same time enraging and fascinating, like nothing I’ve ever experienced. And ensconced in such enjoyable prose, lovely language, and to boot, a romantic story…it just makes the pill go down so easy. How does Mary Poppins say it?…

It’s almost hypnotic to read this blueprint of an underworld forbidden to me, or the day-to-day reality of such a hated/adored religious minority in the country I’ve been linving in for what feels like so long. And tonight I finally understood what it is that I didn’t know, and how this has made all the difference in some way.

It’s so interesting that the personal intensity–or should I say, really the personal relevance–of the experience has nothing to do with its magnitude. This profound realization of what reality is to a small yet highly visible cross section of Israel will affect my life in a minute if not imperceptible way, but for me, the fact it was profound is just…life-changing.

I guess that’s the power of truth, encased in excellent writing…It simply hits you and you just blink, and understand everything so quickly, and things just shift in your head so you re-arrange what you knew before in order to make room for this new parcel that you don’t ever want to let go of, because not only does it shine so brightly, but it’s so well packaged…

I’m not going to give examples, because they would pale in comparison with a rave midnight review of a book that might be to many others but an exotic unrealistic love story. And I will leave them all to their assumptions, and keep my magical experience to my un-findable web site, in my own little self-published world. And I will keep wondering what this ubiquitous Gefilte fish tastes like.

The perfect song

I’m going insane right now. I think. I alternatively feel like I want to cry and sleep, and my ear is in so much pain it is magnified by the cabin fever. It seems like because I never get any other kind of fever (the last time I had a temperature was fifteen years ago when I had malaria and it had me sucking on ice cubes) cabin fever is just ten times worse for me and makes me want to die. I’m just so so sad. And I’m looking for the perfect song. My last roommate in college used to say she liked to listen to sad music when she was depressed as a way to highlight her mood, and she would go to good old Elliot Smith.

When I’m so happy I’m going to burst, I sift through my music looking for the song that will perfectly express what I feel and I never find it. So when I’m no longer so happy that I’m tingling all over, and suffering from all that contained joy, I think, clear-headedly, “I need to get me some of that throw your shoes in the river, and laughter echoing in the valley, long hair you don’t have flying in the wind happy music for another time like that”.

Maybe I will never find the perfect song because the perfect song is always different because the feeling is always different, and the moment is always different.

Maybe I’ll never find that song because I like words so much. Every time I feel this way, words just stream out to tell me what it is I am feeling and how the world shifts around me, imperceptibly and oh-so profoundly at the same time. As if the world was doing one long dance with me, that edges away from the last feeling towards the next, and is perfectly in the present. Words sway with me. I know them, at least. Music is just something I want as a soundtrack, but I guess my life isn’t a movie. Or maybe words are just my form of music. I life my life so silently most of the time, the hundreds of albums I have stay dormant for days and weeks on end.

I just need to get out of the flat. I am really suffering from this cabin fever. I am not seeing anything clearly anymore, it’s almost like near-far-sighted blindness. Everything is so blurry close, far and around that you just can’t distinguish anything. I’m taking it all personally. The dry toast, the spilled sesame seeds, the sodium-packed soups, the lack of fruit. Each inanimate thing is another proof of my inadequacy.

I need to get back to work. Occupy my mind. Save myself.

“The word PhD doesn’t necessarily mean it’s useless”

In the category of “What stupid thing will V say today?” this one ranks quite high. I think it actually eclipsed the series of highly stupid other things that I said at some point today. Eclipsing myself is really something I do quite well, which is why I like to spend time alone on my balcony “meditating”, causing no grave danger to my surroundings.

I’ve been reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” lately. To which everyone always says “Why?”, which, surprisingly is the same reaction our Israeli travel agent moving to Lagos, Nigeria got from our Ghanaian friend: a loud, resounding, surprised, “Why?”

Anyway. Tolstoy gets the same stupid remarks Australia gets, except that instead of “But it’s so faaaar away!” in a whining voice it’s “But it’s so loooong!” And granted, War and Peace is long, I’ve been reading it for two weeks and I’m still only a fifth of the way through the book, but it’s amazing, he manages to pin down characters and personalities in a few well aimed sentences and sharpened words and for a writer, it’s the biggest rush. Even the battle scenes, tedious though they may be, are amazingly vivid and well written, even in translation, which is a huge feat.

So I’ve loved every minute of this book so far, all the hours I’ve spent on it, which is a good thing. But the other day, I read a sentence that made me slam the book shut and punish it for a few days. I actually lobbied against my own book.

Page 279:

“As always with lonely women who have lived for any length of time without masculine society, when Anatol appeared, all three women of Prince Nikolai Andreyevich’s household felt that they had not been really living before. Their powers of thought, feeling, and observation instantly increased tenfold, and it was as if their lives, which till then had been passed in darkness, were suddenly lit up by a new light that was charged with meaning.”

Areugneugneu. Harumpfhfhfhfh.

prayer

Don’t you ever find yourself wishing you knew all the words to a particularly good song? I bob my head so enthusiastically sometimes that it feels like I wrote the words to this song and simply momentarily forgot them. I do this a lot with Ani DiFranco songs.

Someone (when I first got to the States and was being introduced to all the pop culture at once, games, trivia etc) told me that “people” usually say the word ‘watermelon’ to mask the fact they don’t know the words to a song, and because that word contains a lot of the different mouthings (? what would you call the different shapes your mouth makes when you mouth a word?) it actually fools people into thinking you know the words.

So we played Taboo a few days later with a different group of friends and my clue to the word “Watermelon” was “what you say when you don’t know the words to a song”. Buzzer….time out. :-) Take it from me, pop culture is difficult to fake with the perfect tone. Sometimes you’re way off.

I’m picking up where I left off, quietly, because I don’t know who reads this anymore, or who found it, or how.

Walking down from the Hadar on Friday, I stopped to buy some food, fresh ground beef and and an onion, which I carefully picked from a dark concrete hole of a store which in the storefront held only blue plastic crates filled with small beaten-up watermelons and on the ground, a few cardboard boxes full of onions. I brought it to one of the six old Arab men sitting behind the table, and one of them walked to the cash register before he looked at me, stopped, looked at my onion, and motioned me away, half-closing his eyes and nodding as he motioned, in that international non-verbal code for “I’m giving it to you, it’s a gift, go on, now go”. I breathed in and laughed, my new way of accepting the nice gesture (inhaling it in) and thanked him and walked away, still hearing my own giggle echoing in the dirty little store, selling only watermelon and onions.

I put up one of my brother’s photos as the background for my computer. I find myself clearing it often just to look at it. It’s a parking lot in California, at 3 AM. The lights give off a blue light, and two signs saying “Customer Parking Only” nailed to the wooden palissade, form the background for a perfectly parked windsurfing wishbone. A lone, solitary wishbone in a blue-lit parking lot in California at 3 AM. I think it’s such a statement. You could go so many places there. I have all the short stories that I can make up in between conversation lulls made up as I walk along my Middle-Eastern staircases, clearing the cobwebs of other stories, dusted over by something more prolific.

In conversation today, my friend mentioned that he put a person he’d read about in the New York Times on his prayer list (he keeps a personal prayer list of people, communities etc. to pray for). This man had married late in life and his ten-year old daughter was everything to him. After the siege of the school in Beslan, Chechnya, he lost both his wife and his daughter, and his world was destroyed. Unable to cope with the loss, or maybe to cope with it, he set the table for all three of them, every morning. And this man, this stranger, who somehow found his way into my friend’s heart and now mine, is being prayed for in the Holy Land, by a person unknown to him.

I like that my friend had a big enough heart to keep Vova Tumayev on his prayer list. That’s how we make effective change in the world, you start with your heart and you move forward with your heart pointed in the right direction. It’s hard to love, but I think, I hope, it gets better with practice. I learn a lot from conversations in sheruts. It will be hard to leave Israel.

In Vitro Prayerization: this is a story about how prayer may influence in-vitro fertilization results.

I remember taking a class in college about identity and the place people call home. Some French writers (it was a French lit class) called their home their books, or their childhood home, I think for me it’s becoming Israel, simply because I opened my eyes.