First year down.

Friday was our first anniversary. DH and I have been married for one year, together for more than five (oh my! when I met him I was still legitimately 22 years old!!!), and living in the same house for most of the last four.
But oh, - you know what, let's just, for the sake of gravity, put a period there - oh. What a year this last one has been.
Like almost every year when you look back on it, it seems like "whoa, time flew!". But there is something contradictory about this feeling, because it has been a year so loaded with experiences of the sort that in order to be absorbed need time – if at all anything can help you comprehend the incomprehensible, digest the cold lumps of earth that life sometimes puts on your plate. But from wedding to funeral in seven and a half months, to mention just the very tip of the top-of-the-list mega-events of one's life – forget about moving to a different country where it rains in the summer and my family is in a different time zone so my 86 year old grandmother (!) calls on the eve of our anniversary (!!!) to say mazal tov and that she's been thinking of us and I want to stop everything and cry but mainly just stop everything for a little, just have time move more slowly so I can take a look at life and be perplexed (which is probably what this blog is for). Yeah, forget that – this year has been moving in an almost out of hand haste. Not that farewells from your 32 year old sister can ever be other than untimely, and I mean something you simply never have enough time for. N parted the world calmly, after quite literally making it to all her deadlines, while we were all out of breath. Stay. Just a little bit longer.


One of the directors at DirectorsLab, during her closing remarks, told us how just hours after her father died, she realized life was really in the relations between people, and while this sounds somehow lame now that I'm reproducing this here, it was very moving how she said it, and I think she was touching precisely on this, on how you use your time on earth to connect to another human being. That that is what makes your time alive worthwhile. And as she talked I was getting teary because I thought I'm not sure there was so much life between N and me in that sense and how it's all over now and a piece of life, a piece of my life I could have had, is gone.

Wait, but this was supposed to be an anniversary-celebrating post.
OK. So the person I live with in all senses of the term and possibly spend too much time with, is DH. And you know what else happened this week? Facebook asked me to please confirm my relationship with him and then I get reminders of our anniversary with little red hearts next to them. So, honoring his finally joining me at and sharing our marital status in the Kingdom of Procrastination, here are some other incredible facts I have learned during this year of our "relationship":
That we can communicate using solely our eyebrows and occasional monosyllables.
That he knows what I'm thinking the minute I open the refrigerator without even seeing my face.
That he still loves me despite my obsessiveness about food and the fact that I don't and will never even taste the amazing (so I'm told) roast-beef AND chocolate truffles he makes.
That he will cook for me when I am sick or tired or too busy to obsess about food (this last one does not happen often. But still, good to know).
That really and truly, the one thing he wants most in the world is for me to laugh one of my crazy laughs. Or at least smile.
That I can have a genuine crush on somebody else and know it might mean something but nothing inherently about US, and that I can tell him about it and he will be the coolest, most graciously adorable man on earth.
[While on the subject of crushes/flirts: Over our sushi-anniversary dinner, he asks me if I would date the DJ who played at our wedding and also owns one of the nicer hummus places in Jerusalem. Answer: Hell yeah! But would you bring him home to meet your parents? Answer: hmmmmm……]
That we can have such conversations.
And… I think this last one will also count as a relationship-related thing:
I learned to use a pastry blender to create flaky doughs such as this (not to mention an amazing cherry-pitting technique I learned from the cherry-vendor)




I have almost learned to trust DH enough to do the dishes just fine. But that leaves us something to aspire to for next year.

Directors Camp-Workshop-Think Tank-Laboratory Internship

Post-Diluvium indeed. I didn't even remember that's how I ended my last post, but it is so uncannily appropriate to the apocalyptic weather we're having here. Not only were there hail and turnado-ish (or is hurricanean?) winds, but some kind of firefighters alarm is still constantly sounded, and the skies are a dark shade of yellow.
The Guggenheim and Central Park and people-watching in East Village and a lovely, peaceful Brooklyn weekend with our favorite 1-year old daughter of the best friends we don't see enough - all have practically been washed away from the short-term memory in which they should technically still reside.
The week-long flood of a workshop that came straight after them has been a conflictual experience for me. Partly, inherently, because I am not too good with groups. They make me feel extremely self-conscious, whenever I am required to say something I feel on the spot and am at a loss for words, my command of the English language falters and my sense of foreignness is heightened, and whenever I want to say something most of the same happens and I end up expressing poorly articulated half-thoughts (if not forgoing the bold act of speaking out altogether, which happened more often that not). Groups do not bring out my full potential, let me say that. In this case in particular, perhaps, because I felt like an outsider not only as an Israeli in disguise (bless my American accent… it makes me seem more fluent than I am… wait, is that a good thing?), but mostly as a more-of-an-academia-person and less of a theatre-artist, see, I'm only the intern. Now that kinda sucks, when a) you're in a room full of theatre directors that are there to share their thoughts about their art and craft, b) you (i.e. I) got it in your head that what you want to be when you grow up is a theatre director but for now I'll just keep busting my ass off at the Classics department and keep kicking myself and thinking I'm a total wuss and sell-out for not leaving everything and just doing all I can 24/7 to make a theatre artist out of myself, but hey I kinda also want to be a classics scholar and I also think I might be pretty good at it… and after a week of talking and talking about theatre I end up thinking maybe that's not what I want to do with my life because there are so many of us (them?) and everybody's trying to find their voice and struggling for an audience and funding and fulfillment and what is there still to be said, really? Does the world need - not "art" in general, yes the theatre is about humanity etc etc, the question is not even worth asking anymore - but SO MUCH ART? And I leave a friend's house, slightly drunk at 1 am Friday night, couldn't believe I'm still up after a week of 12-14 hour-long days of workshops and rehearsal-observing and talking talking and packing lunch and snacks and more snacks for the road - and virtually on the landing outside his door I say "I'm not sure anymore if that's what I want to do" and he asks "what, theatre or academia?" and I just go "AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!" because I don't even know the answer to that.
And I guess the shutting myself up or blocking myself out of some of the experiences I could have had in this LAB if! only! I was more! convicted!!, was exactly a reaction to the need to answer the question, right here right now, though I'm still on the landing, in the in-between, and feeling it's an either-or situation, and what I kept telling others (and myself) is "I'm worried I won't have a chance to do any extra-curricular stuff (i.e. theatre) once school starts" and that's probably true, but still this frame of mind is detrimental to creativity and puts grad school in the box of "boring commitment that will suck the life out of me" instead of an exciting and stimulating path to look forward to giddily.
So the lab is over, and the need to wrestle groupiness and group-talks and group-dinners and group-hugs and the most aggressive air conditioner I have ever encountered and I'm so tired it hurts to sit AND I've got my fucking period, I would really rather be in a place where I can shower four times a day - all this is thankfully behind me. And now, at least, some of this lab can finally sink into place. And besides meeting some truly incredible people, a bunch of which are from Chicago - and if the "only" thing I "get out" of this lab is a group of people with which to see theatre together every once in a while, that in itself is huge because it's at least putting me in some kind of a community instead of a self-deprecating vacuum - besides that I can once again see where creativity has a place in my life, my actual life right now, not the one I will maybe have after I get more experienced. And while this creativity is not necessarily in the "theatre", as long as it has a place to grow, and a framework in which to communicate with others, I have the right to feel I am fulfilling myself.
P.S.
Also helpful in getting a smiling outlook on life: going out to drinks in Pilsen with my favorite two Daniels in the world (one old, one new! so fun to have new friends at the ripe age of almost 28!) and my very own best-looking DH with his newly purchased hat from a shop in the Village that was so cool everybody there looked hipstery-gay. Except me.

Deluge

My father has recently dubbed this a "Post-Zionist Blog". Really now, why not just go full-fledged Post-Zionist Daughter? Hey, dad, couldn't you have just called it a post-Zionist post? There was just one of them so far… And this is my cue to lay politics aside (I mean, come on, it's not like I have a readership to address and educate. Good thing no-one reads this other than a) people who agree with me, b) my dad… Hey, there's one of those emoticon smileys here, ok?) and go back to concentrating on me me me (and some bake bake bake).
Well then, in my escapist bubble of a life there is rather a degree of hustle and bustle that has not been experienced for several months. First of all, DirectorsLab starts in less than a week! Exciting!!! I hope and pray that there will be interesting and engaging activities for us mere interns to be engaged in. For use in their first-day introductory exercises, they asked us to send "an unusual fact" about ourselves. Now, candidate pieces of information popped into my head in this order: I have never learned to ride a bicycle (more and more people are learning this not un-embarrassing fact bout me in the last few weeks…); my sister died four months ago; and, after relatively a lot more thought, I do not like chocolate also came to mind. I went with no. 1, though both 2 and 3 have a very shocking affect - of dissimilar kind - to them. No. 2 could have been a bit of a bummer in a casual get-to-know-each other game, don't you think?

I have been reading mostly theater related stuff all week. On the one hand, the Lab people sent us a bunch of references to theatre practitioners from Peter Brook to other more obscure (to my ignorant self) directors such as Dario Fo and Vsevolod Meyerhold. On the side project side, quite a bunch of very contemporary plays that are considered for production in the next season have come my way. It seems like I'm slowly but surely being seriously deemed part of the brain-storming and decision-making team of this young and lively theater (as I write this I got an email from the artistic director opening with "GREAT script meeting yesterday! I'm excited!!!"). He, like everybody else on board, is volunteering to make this theater happen, simultaneously coping with a dreary day-job…
Immersed in all these theater thoughts, the conflict between what I officially do (as of next September at the latest) in the academia and the amount of time and energy it will demand, and what I really want to do - uh, yeah, that would be theatre - is becoming more and more pronounced. The frustration is appeased only slightly by a vague intuition and hope that there will come a time in the future when I might be able to actually do both theatre and classical scholarship, and that what I have achieved in the last few months in terms of connections and observations will not go to waste until and/or unless I officially study theater and have real opportunities to direct (when will I get one of those? pleeeease?…. is it just a matter of me being ballsy enough to seize them?!? Because that interpretation may put me straight on the good old downhill of self-berating dispiritedness.) Anyway, I'm getting ready for an intensive week of theatre, on the other side of which await Greek-reading summer courses… Or maybe some mysterious unexpected personal growth/directorial development?!? Tum tum Taaahahahaaa.

But right before the Lab, adding to the buzz and excitement of this coming week and a half, and to the feeling of blind anticipation of what to expect afterward - DH and I are going to NYC for the weekend! In a word: yay!!!

See you post-diluvium.