- slugs, of all sizes
- an incredibly long worm-like thing. thought it was a snake at first.
- smaller green worms. those are actually kind of cute.
- cockroaches. only 2, but still.
- two spiders the size of my effin palm. one ambled in while i was in the shower. i kept my cool, kinda - if you can believe it.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
creep me, crawl me.
the insects that have inside my house/bedroom/bathroom/kitchen have been, until this point, as follows:
Monday, May 17, 2010
photo happy
so for those of you who read my last post... i'm feeling more hopeful, mainly because of this: ACTIVISM FESTIVAL!!!
i'm volunteering there with a group called Bikurim, "an Israeli NGO that aims to strengthen the foundations of a pluralistic society in Israel through the use of socially aware children's literature." it's great, the book they are currently aiming to distribute is a lovely story with beuatiful art and i'm proud to peddle it. i love Micka, the one woman i met so far, and i'm sure it can only get better as i meet more people with the project. she's the one i mentioned in my last post... and it was successful. a kinda-friend!
(i realize now that i failed to mention Elisa, a nifty energetic lady with whom i've been spending a ton of time with since i got here. she's from Buffalo, has her degree in baking, likes my cooking, and we are each other's only friend here that we didn't meet through our men. she's been here a while, since doing birthright in august and staying to make Aliyah and hang out for a bit with her taglit-acquired boyfriend. we made tiramisu yesterday. damn, those things take a bitchin' long time to make!)
so i'm going to be at the festival all weekend... and housesitting this week at a friend's gorgeous place in the near-by German colony. it's Shavuot this week, a holiday where you eat dairy and drink wine, so we'll have a garden gathering while we're at this beautiful house. maybe i'll make a cheesefake. pumpkin, or chocolate-peanut butter? oh DAMMIT i need soft tofu and you can't get that anywhere here. :( well, i'm going to plant-based-cheese-making workshop tonight at Ginger, the vegetarian community center, so maybe i'll learn of something i can use. (ohhhhh how i used to devour cheese blintzes. if i could make a "cheese" blintz, i will worship at this workshopper's feet.)
oh here's pictures of our "garden" of tea mints and other herbs. and neighbours. :)
and old pics of our Purim brunch with friends. remember you dress up for Purim? :) we ate lunch then went on an avdenture to find floods from the rainstorms we'd been having, but just ended up goofing off in the desert mountains somewhere on the way to the dead sea. also,
there was a flood at his place so there are some ugly pictures of a wet ceiling.
xo
p.s i started reading the Foer, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." it's awesome. :)
i'm volunteering there with a group called Bikurim, "an Israeli NGO that aims to strengthen the foundations of a pluralistic society in Israel through the use of socially aware children's literature." it's great, the book they are currently aiming to distribute is a lovely story with beuatiful art and i'm proud to peddle it. i love Micka, the one woman i met so far, and i'm sure it can only get better as i meet more people with the project. she's the one i mentioned in my last post... and it was successful. a kinda-friend!
(i realize now that i failed to mention Elisa, a nifty energetic lady with whom i've been spending a ton of time with since i got here. she's from Buffalo, has her degree in baking, likes my cooking, and we are each other's only friend here that we didn't meet through our men. she's been here a while, since doing birthright in august and staying to make Aliyah and hang out for a bit with her taglit-acquired boyfriend. we made tiramisu yesterday. damn, those things take a bitchin' long time to make!)
so i'm going to be at the festival all weekend... and housesitting this week at a friend's gorgeous place in the near-by German colony. it's Shavuot this week, a holiday where you eat dairy and drink wine, so we'll have a garden gathering while we're at this beautiful house. maybe i'll make a cheesefake. pumpkin, or chocolate-peanut butter? oh DAMMIT i need soft tofu and you can't get that anywhere here. :( well, i'm going to plant-based-cheese-making workshop tonight at Ginger, the vegetarian community center, so maybe i'll learn of something i can use. (ohhhhh how i used to devour cheese blintzes. if i could make a "cheese" blintz, i will worship at this workshopper's feet.)
oh here's pictures of our "garden" of tea mints and other herbs. and neighbours. :)
and old pics of our Purim brunch with friends. remember you dress up for Purim? :) we ate lunch then went on an avdenture to find floods from the rainstorms we'd been having, but just ended up goofing off in the desert mountains somewhere on the way to the dead sea. also,
there was a flood at his place so there are some ugly pictures of a wet ceiling.
xo
p.s i started reading the Foer, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." it's awesome. :)
Friday, May 7, 2010
thank goodness i'm literate
so i've been missing home hardcore lately. the past week and half or so have been particularly rough. i think it's faire (if you're Medieval, or if you're literate like i've claimed to be, fair) to say that i suppressed everything when i got here. i was kind of emotionally flat. i didn't realize it at the time, but i'm pretty sure this is an accurate description. i was a bit stunned, and thus took everything in really easily. i didn't realize that i wasn't really taking things in though... i was just letting them slide around me, like slippery fish in a barrel. (i'm reading Memoirs of a Geisha, so forgive the Eastern poetics.) and i think because i wasn't really taking it in, i wasn't fully grasping the enormity of my situation here.
and now i do.
and i'm kinda panicking, just a little. i know, it's against the number one rule if i'm going to be an intergalactic space traveler! but here i am!
i miss my friends. a lot. yes, i'm talking to YOU. i miss people understanding me. i don't know if you've ever had to make friends as an adult, but it's not fun. in fact, it's exhausting. and i'm too old for this crap. where's my camp crew, with whom i can be totally emo and totally ridiculous all in the span of 4.7 seconds? where are my jammin buddies that fulfil my creative and sonourous needs, no matter the hour? where are those special few, that don't even need to hear my voice when i call, and they're at my house in a jiffy making tea/cookies/music because they heard, in my silence, that i needed it? where's my mom? where are YOU??
i applied for a job last week. the position requires bilingualism, and unfortunately that second language is Hebrew, not my second language of Pig Latin (thanks for that, Mom). it seemed like a pretty cool job so i sent in a resume and a kick-ass cover letter, hoping to attract their attention. to my dismay, i attracted their attention. i got called for an interview. and i got called for a second interview, at which i needed to read two pages of hebrew. and on our way home, driving south from haifa the night before my interview, i got so overwhelmed that i wished i was applying for a job in electrical engineering or as a harvard math professor or a bee farmer or ANYTHING - as long as it was in English, because anything at all could've been easier to fake than knowing how to speak hebrew. and then i just kinda wigged out, shed a few buckets, and got into bed and read "Time Traveler's Wife" for the next two hours until i couldn't focus my eyes anymore. the thing is, i've read time traveler's wife, maybe 5 or 6 times. and i love it. but reading it was not because i love it... it became my home, my friends, what felt familiar to me.
To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. ~Chinese Saying
books are my friends right now. Memoirs of a Geisha = case in point. read that one a few times too. and just finished it for the fewtimes+1th time. gonna try and read a new book, then transition to a new friend. maybe one will come of Micka, the woman who volunteers with the publishing place. (write about that after... i'm meeting her tomorrow). we'll see - if she becomes a friend, and if i read White Oleander (again) or go onto Nick Hornby, or my first Jonathan Safran Foer. ("first??" i know - tragic, right?) I'm still in the middle of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, but you can go in and out of that one, it being essays and all.
ok. i feel better now. :)
and p.s, i kinda got offered that job. so i'm proud of myself, in the end, that at least i did something totally scary, and learned something from it too. i didn't take the job cause i would've had to start work at 630am some mornings... and i didn't even need to work backwards to when i'd have to wake up to blurt YAH RIGHT at them (in my head).
and now i do.
and i'm kinda panicking, just a little. i know, it's against the number one rule if i'm going to be an intergalactic space traveler! but here i am!
i miss my friends. a lot. yes, i'm talking to YOU. i miss people understanding me. i don't know if you've ever had to make friends as an adult, but it's not fun. in fact, it's exhausting. and i'm too old for this crap. where's my camp crew, with whom i can be totally emo and totally ridiculous all in the span of 4.7 seconds? where are my jammin buddies that fulfil my creative and sonourous needs, no matter the hour? where are those special few, that don't even need to hear my voice when i call, and they're at my house in a jiffy making tea/cookies/music because they heard, in my silence, that i needed it? where's my mom? where are YOU??
i applied for a job last week. the position requires bilingualism, and unfortunately that second language is Hebrew, not my second language of Pig Latin (thanks for that, Mom). it seemed like a pretty cool job so i sent in a resume and a kick-ass cover letter, hoping to attract their attention. to my dismay, i attracted their attention. i got called for an interview. and i got called for a second interview, at which i needed to read two pages of hebrew. and on our way home, driving south from haifa the night before my interview, i got so overwhelmed that i wished i was applying for a job in electrical engineering or as a harvard math professor or a bee farmer or ANYTHING - as long as it was in English, because anything at all could've been easier to fake than knowing how to speak hebrew. and then i just kinda wigged out, shed a few buckets, and got into bed and read "Time Traveler's Wife" for the next two hours until i couldn't focus my eyes anymore. the thing is, i've read time traveler's wife, maybe 5 or 6 times. and i love it. but reading it was not because i love it... it became my home, my friends, what felt familiar to me.
To read a book for the first time is to make an acquaintance with a new friend; to read it for a second time is to meet an old one. ~Chinese Saying
books are my friends right now. Memoirs of a Geisha = case in point. read that one a few times too. and just finished it for the fewtimes+1th time. gonna try and read a new book, then transition to a new friend. maybe one will come of Micka, the woman who volunteers with the publishing place. (write about that after... i'm meeting her tomorrow). we'll see - if she becomes a friend, and if i read White Oleander (again) or go onto Nick Hornby, or my first Jonathan Safran Foer. ("first??" i know - tragic, right?) I'm still in the middle of When You Are Engulfed in Flames, but you can go in and out of that one, it being essays and all.
ok. i feel better now. :)
and p.s, i kinda got offered that job. so i'm proud of myself, in the end, that at least i did something totally scary, and learned something from it too. i didn't take the job cause i would've had to start work at 630am some mornings... and i didn't even need to work backwards to when i'd have to wake up to blurt YAH RIGHT at them (in my head).
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