The FUB

The time-lapses between posts here are just getting longer and longer (which is not to say that in my head I haven't written, or at least started to write, dozens of posts in the last few months). OK, now that we've got the sorry-for-being-lame part out of the way, I can get on with it. And to my current obsession: sourdough starter. My short little span of attention is suffering from yet another source of distraction – will my little baby sourdough starter make it to maturity? Will I not kill it? Will it not kill me?!? As is my wont, I started out without exact instructions – I had an envelope of store-bought sourdough starter culture sitting in the cupboard for many months, which did or did not mean it was expired, and had apparently lost the instructions that came with it, but then I sort of improvised according to starting-from-scratch recipes nonetheless, in a vain attempt to tone down my obsessive tendencies, believing it will all work out – but now of course I am obsessively reading about it, in fact, mostly re-reading my three main sources of information and trying my best to do exactly as they suggest – after all it is a microorganism! that has to be fed regularly! at the same time of day because it acquires a memory! PLEASE, let not my sourdough starter develop separation anxiety at this tender age!! – measuring and feeding, discarding and measuring, feeding and worrying. I believe we have endured the phase where the reigning bacteria is not yeast but some kind of vomit-smell producing nastiness (this is real, apparently. Cf. above "it might kill me" link). But I'm not sure that nasty part is all over and hope I won't have to throw it all out soon. As is also my wont, I am mostly worried about what will be in the farther future, as if I haven't enough unknown to deal with as it is, wondering what exactly is the right schedule for preparing the starter when I will actually want to bake something (bread, perhaps?) while still maintaining the rest in shape. One blogger-authority feeds his starter at night, while the other feeds hers in the morning. CONUNDRUM. Wish me luck in getting to that next level of anxiety, dear readers.

What finally pushed me to start the sourdough project I've been putting off for months was the sad realization that most of my jar of active dry yeast has died on me. A moment, if you will.
One cake ended up in the trash, and another final attempt at cinnamon rolls, while it was not wholly unsuccessful – as far as yummy delicious rugelach-like cinnamon cookie-treats go, they were actually great – did seem to prove that the yeast is not doing all that it should.
All this has been taking place at our household during the week of The Festival of the Unleavened Bread (most hilarious translated religious terminology, possibly ever. Probably anything that starts with THE FESTIVAL OF will win that title, though).

UPDATE: I have indeed thrown out almost all of the starter I was trying to maintain (two batches in two different containers! just to be on the safe side!!), and what is left is acting out on me, probably because I've switched from night- to morning-feedings. To alleviate my frustration and craving for homemade bread, I made some Challah, thus proving that the yeast I have is in fact pretty much alive. It's not just me, ALL the living organisms in this house are thoroughly neurotic. And yes, it is still Passover, aka the FUB, over here. You're not offended, I hope, or at least not remotely surprised over my yeast-nourishing conduct precisely at this time of year.

To add to the festivities I made some matzo-ball soup and had one batch of balls upped with (too) much chopped parsley, arugula and dill. My mother would be proud at the depart from customary eastern-European cuisine but I think I like the original version better. We were not invited to any Seder and that was totally fine by me, but I did get a little sad over how dismissive I am about such traditions. In recent years, my side of the family has developed a slightly perverted disdain for Jewish holidays, with their concomitant family-gatherings and very specific not-always-so-inspiring foods. I'm talking gefilte fish here, people. My mother has already threatened once that she will replace the gefilte with homemade sushi rolls (a threat I'm still waiting to cash in on, by the way). But it has gotten to the point where an event like Seder is anticipated with horrified disgust. Such moments fit too well with my memory of N and her, shall we say, food-aversion. Too well, because I don't want to remember her only as a disliker, of tastes that I, despite it all, still feel nostalgic for. And I envy DH for still considering family gatherings a treat, still relishing the dishes his mother makes, like when he was a child. I think I've developed a defense mechanism, where I would rather just spurn Family with a capital F than realize how hard it would be for mine to keep up the capital F quality… than feel the pain that we've somehow lost that quality even before N died (not to mention the guilt over my contribution to the situation by leaving Home) but that in times like these her absence makes me think of how much she disliked what I would consider comfort-food.
So comfort ends up kicking itself in the face. This is also how I feel about the one-year memorial we recently attended. A pat on the bandaged heart. A distraction from the burning nothingness which is all that is left. It was the definition of a COMFORTing ceremony and this is perhaps as it should be. And as years go by maybe the distraction from the pain and the being in the pain will come together for me somehow. A friend who lost his father a few years ago says the yearly ceremonies are, for him, just that – no matter what content his family struggles to grant to the event – a crushing day that overburdens you with the unfathomability of it still.
And so, surprising myself once more with a sense of tradition, in these days I long for some kind of rootedness, and I find I want to just be near the grave. To stay there for hours.

I end up writing here about N's death almost on every post. Even the ones where I start out thinking I won't. I guess when I finally bring myself to write this is what comes out. I guess that

"I'm not DRUNK. I'm just... really wobbly right now"

Yes indeed. While the original bearer of this proclamation was undoubtedly drunk (a. We can hear you from our apartment. And yet, you are OUTSIDE... You are obviously drunk. b. You just said that. You are obviously drunk.) I have fallen in love with the drunkenness-wobbliness metaphor. The lines we strain to draw between one state and the other.

I have recently been wobbled by the amazing Trisha Brown Dance Company. THIS is the kind of dance I would have loved to do. (An even better example here. A snippet of the version with the original cast, including TB herself, may be found on the TBDC website, but the video quality is much poorer. I think the beautiful Hungarian youngsters are doing a fine job, except for smiling too much here and there).

Here's to DH and I keeping at least half our New Year's Resolutions – to go out to a theater/concert/cultural event/show at least twice a month. The other half was: every other week – the week where we're not being highbrow culture consumerists – go out to a MOVIE! An unintellectual form of entertainment! We even shook hands on this. Alas, we have not been to the cinema even once since, proving our handshake quite worthless. We have been to more concerts of different sorts (the most intellectual and demanding of all, if you ask me – JAZZ concerts) and this does mark an increase in joie de vivre around here, at least around my Roman-Historians-laden desk. In an effort to feel less brain-dead, and more importantly, less bored, when spending the time in which I'm not preparing for the LATIN.QUALIFYING.EXAM.FROM.HELL. I have also decided to cut down on some of the blogs I check out, realizing that most of them are not only self-absorbed, but uninteresting (like, ahem, well, mine?). So apart from the food-blogs, I'm trying to narrow the daily blogroll to those that are at least somewhat brain-stimulating: Brie, Academichic, and the infallible Mimi Smartypants. I mean, she has meta-linguistic comments on Saxon words, that turn into suggestions for the aspiring rockstar (go to #8) – that's my kind of blogger.
Finally, I have finally, FINALLY taken up what I have decided long ago should be my extra-curricular after-school fun activity that will bring music (literally) and meaning (possibly?) to my life: I have been to my first (ever) VOICE LESSON. Conclusions thus far: "You can hum high really well". Updates to come.

The consolation: There is Music Time to exist in.

I'm late. I was all geared up to finally, FI-NA-LLLLLY, let out a sigh of relief and give a warm, if very late, welcome to 2011. Something along the lines of: "Hey two thousand and eleven! I'm ready for you now". This was supposed to happen after I finished my seminar paper and felt fit as fiddle.
But then. Things just did not work out.
The short version is, I had two independent medical situations unfortunately superimposed… well, they were dependent in that one is a long-term chronic maintenance issue – my admittedly gender-neutral but still somewhat hysterical Crohn's inflicted Colon – which can not be treated before I take care of a totally uncalled for gynecological situation, which in turn is just going on and on, as these situations are wont to do. AND THEN, just when things seemed to be getting back on track (it was of course a gynecological illusion at that point) I got sick with a flu-like cold (I got the flu vaccine for HEAVEN'S SAKE. Much good that did me) and was totally out, out of school and business and life for a WHOLE week. If I may be so daring as to quote (but humbly!) from my facebook status:
"Double-you.Tee.Eff. I have a fever. What am I, 8?!? I have a life to attend to, I can't be sick all the time!"
(Whence the inevitable email from my father, asking what Double-you.Tee.Eff means. Here's a hint, dad: WT stands for What the.)
To which one of my grad student friends replied "I was sick all the time when I was in coursework. Literally out for at least a week every quarter… It comes with the territory!" A professor also concurred today that winter term is the bottomless pit of the wretched quarter system.
In any case, the problem now is that I'm almost OK, and should be back to work full blast but am just not sure exactly where to start with the catching up, and the caring about it enough to fight the urge to crawl back into bed and sleep a good ten hours per night like I forgot I could but heartily recommend to all my loved-ones!

The long version is: a mess.
Slightly long version is that winter break sucked tremendously and winter term is refusing to take off in any remotely non-depressing way. There was a time, however, when a new year seemed to be near, hence a bout of severely gloomy resolutions I wrote in that dreaded twilight zone between winter break, which had already proved kinda mostly awful, and winter term. I feel somewhat removed from it now, but it is still a sort of lump in my throat. So here goes:

New Year's Resolutions.
No. 1: Not feel like I SUCK SO BAD. AT EVERYTHING. Including life.
No. 2: FLY LESS.
Since neither of these are going to happen in the near future or at least the coming year, here is a tentative no. 3: maybe I could at least, please, suck less at flying, and the inevitable outcome of flying - not being at home, in my daily routine, a situation that at times coincides with what other people would deem VACATION. (Other times it is better known as VISIT BACK HOME. I do not think I will get remarkably good at that activity for as long as I live.)
I would explain, but I feel so damn pathetic and whining. Which is kind of a No. 4: GET OVER IT. But since lately, at least this last year, IT inescapably feels like the death of my big sister, a thing which is just in general NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN, maybe not until you're 78, I find it kinda hard to shake IT off.
And I was never very good at taking things, or um, life, easy. Nope. I pretty much had a slight nervous breakdown when I was 14 years old and it seemed just too much to keep practicing piano and going to the toughest, most professional ballet school in Israel every day after school as well as being a straight A student (a feat which, guess who, c'mon guess, guess who could do it all? Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding!!!! THAT's RIGHT!!!!!!!! my sister). I had already left the serious classical piano teacher and started seeing a young, cool tutor, who was supposed to teach me how to read chords – somehow I didn't manage even to get that far, though I do clearly remember doing pretty hard hearing exercises of the kind that were basic first-year music academy training, that's what my tutor said, and I remember crying at her place, being very upset about stuff, something to the effect of, oh I don't know, LIFE SUCKS or I SUCK AT LIFE, I was lonely and miserable and I was 14 and I did not wear a bra yet!!! COULD LIFE BE WORSE I ASK YOU. NO. NOOOOO. and I'm pretty sure she was kind of astonished at how bad I was taking it but she tried to give me perspective which I doubt you can do when speaking to a young teenager, but well. And I also remember my mother, right around that time, saying I quit piano because I didn't feel like practicing, and that When Something is HARD, I DO NOT DO IT, as in, a general rule on how I live, and hey Mom, sorry to be so blunt, I know you are among the only 4.5 people who read this but, really? Is that what you really thought? Do you still think it? Because I think choosing to stay at ballet was a much tougher thing to do, and it was H.A.R.D for me to be there not only because I had (have, have, of course I still have) Crohn's and everything body-related was a problem and a struggle, but because I seriously. SERIOUSLY. sucked at it. Maybe that is the only thing I was ever really, emphatically, NOT GOOD AT, but that is the truth. I could not dance. At least not in the standards expected and required at THAT PLACE, aka BALLET SCHOOL (complete with anorexia and terrorizing tight lipped madams). Not compared to all the other young aspiring ballerinas. No, I was one of the very few ugly ducklings around, the unfortunate not blessed with TURN OUT, you can press on that link but I assure you that it pretty much means that you will never ever be graceful and look anything but miserable and pathetic when you are trying to bourree en pointe. (Bourree is what she's doing with her feet. Her arms and hands are also a phenomenal ballet exemplar, the quintessential swanlike figure.)

(Rest assured, I did not fare much better in other genres of modern or contemporary dance. There is a myriad of things wrong with my body, but in a nutshell it is weak and un-flexible and that pretty much puts a lid on any dance aspirations one may have.)
THIS IS THE TRUTH, I am not exaggerating, yes, I may have occasionally wrote things on this blog that may have seemed slightly overstated, but may I be knocked down by thunderbolts if I did not simply, objectively, suck at ballet, and so I'm now positive that I picked the surest way to feel constantly disappointed about my body, and so, arguably, staying at THAT horrible PLACE was, perhaps, not the EASY thing to do.

Remember the getting over it part? So yeah, I'm not quite there yet.

And about the Vacationing resolution. Wait.
This post is completely disheveled. Apologies. (We are still before the period of the beginning of the post wherein I realize I'm not only late on the new year's resolutions, but my calendar-alarm to send a check to my proprietor is going off, it is that late in January. DTE! (Which stands for Double-you.Tee.Eff. OBVIOUSLY). Just for your general orientation.) I wrote the above after coming back from a short visit to NYC over Winter Break, which not exactly a break etc etc due to those medical situations which my later me has already divulged above. Frankly, most of the last month has been spent in nauseous anxiety but it seems like the bad part is over now.
So I have not been able to get as much work done over the "Break" as I planned, because I was anxiously, nauseoustically, preoccupied. So, the other night, I was basically doing nothing, and the nothing I was doing was looking over old photographs of, mostly, DH and myself. We've been together for almost, wait, what, seven years?!? no, I think it's actually six but it's fair to say that at this point I have lost track. So, I was flicking through, basically, snippets from my soon to be gone twenties. And you know the really strange thing? I felt like I had no memories of those days that are documented in the photos. It's not as if I don't remember where the picture was taken or what we were doing there, it's just that, I felt this weird estranged feeling, like I could not tell you anything about myself at that time, what my life was, who I was. I'm not sure where that feeling came from or what it means.
But since that happened a week or so after I wrote that totally not-over-it drowning-in-teenage-complexes bit, it got me feeling that I'm stuck somewhere. A time-place pre-sister-death, but not a good place. A time-place where the ambitious race of miserableness was still on between us. And then….. and then, much shit hits the fan… and then basically, SHE DIES. And now, a conundrum: is my life easier or harder than hers now?
Get OVER it. GET OVER IT. Stop competing with your sister. She has already won, and lost, forever. YOU LIVE. GAME OVER.


So. Finally. About that trip to NY. I'm no good at being out of my natural habitat, especially in said preoccupied condition. But sometimes a revelation ensues.
Let's just say that I love dearly the friends that were housing us (don't leave NY! We will miss you sooooo!!!!). But my immune system promptly has a mental breakdown when I see my host change his daughter's admittedly non-poopy diaper and then proceed directly to slice pickles for our lunch without an intervening hand-washing session. Minor incident and an occasion for me to demonstrate restraint of my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. And yet an exhausting feat nonetheless. See, that's why vacations are hard. Being in a place where I'm not the sole carrier- and cleaner-of germs is just too strenuous a task to be holiday-fit.
However, and this will soon make sense, on the days immediately after coming back from NYC, I had that children-song "The itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the water spout…" ringing in my head. And it continues: "DOWN! came the rain DOWN! came the rain and washed the spi-DOWN! came the ra-DOWN!"
WHAT? Yeah. I'll explain: said father-host is also a composer. Which is to say that, among other things, he's very talented music-wise and has a very good ear. And when he sings to his daughter it apparently sometimes goes like this: she, like a 18-month-old genius, is interested in the UP-DOWN part of the song. And so she wants to get to the DOWN! part already, over and over again. And when she sing-shouts Down!, her father responds with the rest of the line. Whenever she sings it, no matter where in the line he is. And the even more mind-blowing thing about it is how this amazing dad modulates his own singing voice to the precise note her Down! hits.
A refracted key-transposed children rhyme. Response-repetition.
This magical musical-interpersonal phenomenon defies description and so I'm not sure if my lame attempt to reproduce it here makes sense. But.
I feel so grateful for having witnessed that intimate moment between father and daughter, a moment of total immersion in being-for-another, parent for child. Which was playful and immediate and songful and not wordy at all like this damn blog. Thank you. You are a family.

Against all odds, I'm still alive!

Hey Lou,
How've you been? I haven't seen you around lately. Oh yeah, you're right. It's me that hasn't been returning your calls. Well, you know how life is. Please don't be offended – I've been meaning to write for ages… and it's not just you. I have hardly spoken to anyone other than DH in the past ten weeks. Good thing he's around. Without him, I don't know how I would a) be nourished properly, b) survive this crazy little thing called "we'll give you a scholarship, you just be brilliant and work your ass off in an essentially mental-masturbation environment where your ass-working-off labor has slim chances of eventually getting you a grownup job, much less make any difference in the world. And if you didn't question yourself every step of the way, we'd actually think you're not entirely normal. We're open-minded that way. Run along now, be brilliant!"
So Lou, forgive me if I forgo a comprehensive update of what's been up with me since the end of the summer. I had several such plans at various points in the last two or three months, for example where I realized Septembers are going to SUCK from now on till further announcement – lethal combination of end-of-summer weather, Hebrew holiday season, and my birthday, which is a mere 8 days after my sister's and we always celebrated ours together. So this fall the buildup towards our mostly stressful and sad visit in Israel was sprinkled with probably-anxiety-related middle-of-the-night nausea attacks that nonetheless got my doctor to suggest I should get an MRI. Well (though nauseous panic attacks have almost disappeared), this finally happened today under orders of my new American gastro-doc.
I was not aware of how unpleasant a procedure an MRI is. You are straddled to a narrow hospital bed for an HOUR (that feels like forEVER) and tunneled into the radioactive machine which produces alternate deafening noises of a fire drill, morse code, an old ink printer, and hardcore 80's techno "music" without the "melodic" component. Add to that my life-threatening pseudo-heroic conduct: once released from the contraption I took off out of there in less than two minutes only to nearly faint, stand in line for a cup of tea for which I paid and then pale-facedly left to wander out to the ice-cold air for fear of vomiting at the hospital lobby. The guy came out after me to hand me my tea, actually. If fall term should start and finish in nausea, however, I pick the sub-freezing degrees version.

There were other moments: like when I made a perfect poached egg for my aforementioned not-so-perfect birthday, took pictures of it but never posted them, though I promised my mother-in-law (who is awesome. she calls me on my birthday!) to send her evidence of my egg-technique progress. Then I did not speak to her throughout the ten weeks of term until a few days ago. SERIOUSLY, I was not joking, Lou. DH obviously had some phone calls with her, and I spoke to my mother no less than usual, so I guess in some moral world I'm still ok? In every world containing in-laws, though, I am surely condemned to eternal torment.
Then, after a first week of term, in which I literally wanted to DIE, coursework was making me that miserable, and images of my ambitious, intellectual, working on her death-bed sister met me wherever I turned, I was thrilled at the prospect of writing how I still kinda want to live, um not entirely sure academia is my thing, but yeah, living is still an option, and managed to fit a baked-good or two into my schedule. But then, I didn't write. And then, I had had enough but term wasn't over yet.
AND NOW.
Except for one seminar paper that needs to be produced from scratch (i.e. I still know nothing about my supposed topic "Prostitution in Ancient Athens". eye-roll….) I have lived to see the other side of my first ten-week term of GRAD SCHOOL (crazy little thing et cetera). Conclusions thus far:
1. I am not being "hard on myself" like people tend to think I am (and though it is probably at least somewhat true) when I say that judging by the courses I just finished, I was underqualified for grad work in Latin – though I did not miserably fail so maybe that counts for something. I have probably read more Latin this term than ever in my life before, and I have surely learned a lot (vocab! please stick to my brain this time!) but I feel mentally overwhelmed, like after a language summer course where you could hardly keep up through it and just wait for when it's over so maybe something might sink in and it will eventually seem like you made some progress and are not simply exhausted.
2. Who knew the English language would be such a hurdle? Expressing myself comprehensibly in front of other people among whom a faculty member (let's be honest, we just want all of them to say "No, I don't think you're stupid at all. Actually I think you're quite brilliant, that's why I keep being so thrilled that you're my student. Absolutely THRILLED!". Yes, ideally every single academic-superior that you come across should simply let you know that. But you grad students, you each have at least one prof in particular whose affirmation you pine for, am I right?), so producing coherent sentences in front of a class cum prof - and my writing is constant testimony of my incapability to keep a train of thought, let alone a sentence that has a beginning, some kind of predicate, and end (HA, see what I did here, I'm so self-reflexive… eye-roll. Challenging my reader! eye-roll...) – has proven a task I am not naturally talented for. I was never that good at it in Hebrew, and though my colloquial English is usually absolutely fine, bring up the formality a notch and I am stammering. Give me a sentence in Latin to translate out loud that contains a metaphor, two participles and some nautical technical terms for good measure, and I'm done for.
3. Life is wavering.
This is nothing new. I was never entirely convinced that a life of intellectual curiosity and painstaking writing of something that pretends to contain an actual argument was necessarily the type I would find worth living for, and I'm still not sure about that (HA! now there's at least one qualification I actually have to be a graduate student!!! SELF-DOUBT. Why didn't they tell me it's such an asset? I've got STORES of that and would have smeared it all over my application instead of trying to construct a coherent narrative of my academic career leading to this! particular! amazing! department! Instead, I would have just written: I don't know what I want to do with my life but I've successfully fooled some people into thinking I'm intelligent and perceptive. Now give me a stipend!) But ever since N died, moments of doubt are all encompassing, as in, why live at all? And that too is not new to you if you've been following my bloggingly neurotic accounts of not-so-late. But bottom line is, being a graduate student with health insurance and a scholarship, while living in the same house, city, country as the man I love, is a privilege.
Try to remember that, Lou. And not feel so goddamned guilty for all the people in the world who have no health insurance, income, or a loved-one to make soup for them when they have a very first-world ten-day-long cold. As DH, himself a man that at one point in life seriously contemplated the option of abandoning civilization in favor of chilling out and going native in Northern India, says: you can't give your place up and change it with a third-world woman. You will either die of an exotic disease, or be flown over to the West to get treatment for it. Either way, you lose.

Vain attempt not to WHINE about it

So, I could be telling you of the weekend my brother was visiting us in Chicago, or the 3-week long double summer course I took afterwards, in which I was basically reading Latin and Greek prose from 6 am to 11 pm (actually, I think that pretty much sums it up), or the crazy LA weekend DH and I had in the midst of these three weeks - highlights include me arriving at a decision about what dress to wear to the wedding we were invited to (the reason for us going there in the first place), Crabtree and Evelyn mini shampoos carried off from Hilton, and spotting dolphins (!!) or some small whales just off the shore at Malibu - but I won't. I will instead use this platform, as has become customary, to expound on my moral worthlessness. Enjoy.
OK, so I was telling you about this mapping project I got involved in, right? Basically, it's a small group of students trying to offer a perspective about the neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago, different from the official one propounded by the university, in which everything outside strict and limited boundaries is considered dangerous, and, what a coincidence, is almost universally populated by Blacks. The boundaries between the university community and its facilities and the impoverished surrounding communities are, of course, real, to a large and discouraging extent. By the way, I have just finished reading the amazing memoir of a now-Sociology professor at Columbia University, then a graduate student conducting fieldwork in a community housing project where the chaotic life of the ghettoed tenants is, in effect, run by crack gangs and other semi-official extortive administrators. Well, that was a depressing eye opener. The community it describes is actually geographically farther away from here than the immediate surrounding neighborhoods, and, I think, also more distant as far as their day-to-day reality goes. I was glad to learn more about it, but it did not leave me feeling like there is anything that could be possibly done to end such bitter, devastating poverty and exploitation. In any case, it gave me at least one possible answer to the question that has been interesting me, namely "where do the homeless people actually, well, live?" Now, I'm sure there are many different answers to that question, especially with regards to those who panhandle or sell Streetwise around Hyde Park. But I haven't really gotten around to actually finding out about them, not through my fleeting notion to volunteer at soup kitchens, nor through my involvement with the (very low-key, as far as activism goes) mapping project. There are flickering moments where this group gives me a sense of accomplishment and creativity in the broadest sense of the term, but several lame attempts to actually gain access to the lives of Streetwise vendors – which is what I'm trying to "map" – has left me sad and ashamed.

It started like this: there is one vendor on the street corner near where I do yoga. Before summer-schedule craziness, I used to go to yoga every week, and after a while made it a habit of buying an issue from this vendor. Then, I once complimented him on his new haircut (and felt like such a liberal!), from which point it was clear that we not only recognize and acknowledge one another, but are generally on friendly terms. At the same time, I found out Streetwise organization themselves offer a map of their (official) vendors' locations, including some close up accounts of those who chose the exposure. One of which, it turned out, was "my" Streetwise guy! Then I thought, well, maybe I could start talking him up a bit, learn where he lives, what distance he travels to come and sell these weekly magazines at this particular spot (information that is NOT given on his online profile). I was very nervous at the thought of actually striking up conversation, and one that could easily come across as a nosy interrogation at that. In my fantasy I got him some coffee at the adjacent Starbucks and we genuinely chatted for a while, with me hitting a soft Christian spot telling him I'm from Jerusalem, and him introducing me to all other Streetwise vendors around the neighborhood, officially licensed and otherwise.
OF COURSE that's not how it went. I started mumbling the minute I approached him with my sheepish, "do you have some time off…? [as in, when do you take a 5 minute break, NOT what day of the week are you not here, a distinction which he didn't catch or deliberate misread]… Could I ask you something…?" To make matters worse, my self consciousness about being a snotty white girl was vocalized detrimentally, with the almost first thing blurting itself out of my mouth was a "we're a group from the University of Chicago…" brrrraaaaggggh. Shit. Alienation anybody? Post-racist condescending anyone? Yeah, well. I sensed he felt particularly uncomfortable answering the question "where do you live", and though I tried to present our project as an attempt to incorporate different points of view about Chicago's South Side, I could not shake off the bitterness of the sheer awkwardness of my approach. To make matters worse, I hardly saw him since because my crazy schedule has steered my away from morning yoga lately.
End of Episode A.
Side Kick: Right at the entrance to the bakery across from our apartment stands a panhandling man. According to my Streetwise guy there's a SW vendor there too, whom I don't remember seeing and is not on the official SW map. And of course after I got the information that someone is selling SW there, I kept seeing this panhandling man every time I went to get bread. Now, this bourgeois neighborhood is one in which some homeless people seem to be taken care of quite well. Everybody has a guilt complex, naturally, especially the African Americans who "made it". The SW vendors themselves get more than an occasional dollar from passersby who aren't even interested in an issue (which are sold for $2). The guy in front of the bakery seems to get free food from them, and people habitually help him out before or after their pastry shopping. Now one day, he asked me for some change as I was walking in. My small change wallet was literally empty – because I collect quarters obsessively for laundry and try, no less obsessively, to exchange all the other type of change into quarters – but I remember there were corners of a letter and envelope sticking out of my very ladylike ridiculously huge clutch-purse-wallet. I don't remember the monetary details anymore but leaving the bakery I had two quarters in hand, which I gave the guy with a (arrgggghh, why?) "this is all the change I got, man". I distinctly remember being concerned whether he thought it implausible for a girl with a wallet bulging with papers to not have a swelling pocket of small change and crumpled one-dollar bills, as he was muttering "all the change you got, huh."
Episode B:
I finally came across the SW vendor that was notoriously on the official map but never seen near the Dunkin Donuts when I passed by – which is not as frequent as it used to be because I figured there's a different path to take, in order to evade the homeless guys congregating there on the sidewalk, like, it's uncomfortable, right, I naturally rather not know they exist, or at least not rub it my face, right? – and the one who got my yoga SW guy into the business in the first place. So I spot him half a block away – on a Saturday morning in which I was disappointed not to find my own SW guy at the usual Starbucks corner – and I glance at him and register there's the license badge around his neck, and here's my chance to get in touch with another SW vendor and perhaps be a human being, and another part of my brain just reverts into the usual fear and introversion, and like, what, now I'll have to buy an issue from two guys at the same week?! and I just storm past. And then he gestures with his magazines and calls out, and I stop and turn and get a copy after all. And the Black women who was standing there chatting with him says to me "I thought you were angry". And I try to joke and tell them how random people may tell me "why aren't you smiling?!" (true story. mostly relevant to Israeli cab drivers), and then I walk away and the woman walks with me and says "Don't ever do that again. He was watching you. If you have a dollar, just give him a dollar", and then she went on to tell me about herself a bit but that first sentence was basically the only full one I could in fact comprehend… and I walk into the store I was heading into, in front of which yet another SW lady stands, whom I know is not on the registered map and seems to me the craziest of the bunch, but I'm afraid to stare long enough to see whether she's actually wearing a badge or not, not to mention talking to her and asking about it and whether she's related to the man that used to stand there for months before, and I move around the produce shop dazed and confused and cannot remember a single thing I intended to buy, wondering if I should come back and apologize to him and try to collect my shattered bits of so-called wanting to make a difference self from the sidewalk.

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.