Waking up parched and migrained, having dreamt of my elaborate arrest from buying weed off of some Korean high school students, I came to realize once again that I was in Jane and Michal’s apartment in Israel and was going to be here for a while. Whereas yesterday I spent a good portion of the evening staring off the balcony thinking to myself, well, so this is Israel, today I have no desire to look. I have no desire to get up early and get breakfast with Tal and Yotam, for I can anticipate exactly how hot and exactly how sweaty the enterprise will be, exactly how much it will cost and how much benefit will come to me as a result. In this case it’s an easy call. I have no patience for tel aviv limbo, that socialist purgatory that exists between the tops of desert mountains and ben gurion airport. At the former, you are a free spirit, you are clear and full of hope and real dreams. At the latter, you are free by virtue of your state of travel. In between, however, you are subject to a whole society that somehow got here and decided to have a whole slough of social norms to judge you by and an entire economy with things for sale and so forth. So to go out there right now and get a sandwich is, well, maybe its not that bad. I think I just didn’t want to spend my first daylight moments with Tal, sharing in his own emotions on how weird Israel is. We arrived last night at around eight, and were met at the airport by Karen, Daniel, and Jacob. Not that I was expecting a whole caravan of Hashomer officials to meet us with open arms at the airport, but the fact that our kvutza was the only ones there sent a clear message that the only people we would be able to really depend on during our stay in Israel was ourselves. We are very much alone here, unknown, off the map. Our madrichim are completely spread thin with year round movement responsibilities, so even though our long term presence in Israel is essentially the product of their doing, they just don’t have the time to be there coddling us along the way. And obviously that’s how things should be. We are adults after all, with bachelors degrees from top bourgeois universities, something that immediately makes us better than them.
On a serious note, as per my fantasy about living a life of poverty, it looks like its really going to happen, and even sooner than we thought! The Masa program through which we were assuming to receive a lot of money for our time here may in fact not give us anything at all. This means that already awkward tasks like buying a van, a job I have been awarded jurisdiction over, will get that little extra dose of awkward when I drop the news that we have no money. Perhaps I will find a used car dealer with a big enough heart and the foresight to acknowledge that my pimply American friends and I are the only hope for the future of the State of Israel. Until then I’ll revert to good old fashioned being weird.
I left my girlfriend, Anna, in New York City to fend for herself. She’s helpless without me. She grew up in the wealthiest of the New Jersey suburbs and now lives in a condo her mom bought her in the east village. She goes to the New School with all the other suburban art school elite. She has black died hair and listens to noise recorded on cassette tapes and played through a broken Playskool boom box. JK. I suppose my desire to misrepresent my girlfriend stems from my fear of misrepresenting her. Why do I do things that I am afraid of, you ask? Because I am a crazy person. Considering the fact that my default modus operandi involves so much judging and classifying and seeing who’s better than me, I suppose it is not unexpected that I should be wary of that process being inflicted on the woman I love. Of course I am assuming that others would operate at such a depraved judgmental level as myself.
