Why a black swan named Brooke Greenberg might make you immortal -- or not

Back in the old days, black swans used to take their tea with purple zebras, play hopscotch with orange kangaroos, and ride the unicorn skiff down the Cadbury-cream river with yellow porcupines.  That is to say, black swans didn’t exist.  At least Europeans were certain that they didn’t until a seventeenth century Dutch explorer actually discovered one on a trip to Australia.  It turns out that in the land down under, black swans are not only possible, they’re common.  So if you happen to see an inverted swan waddling by outside of your window, don’t panic.  First off, you're probably in Australia; and secondly, you've just seen a reminder of how a single unexpected observation can topple hundreds of years worth of dogma.

I first heard the story of black swans in a talk by the Chief Scientific Officer at TEVA Pharmaceuticals, Michael Hayden, a few months ago in Jerusalem.  Hayden’s topic was not actually swans, though, but rather drug discovery.  He summed up his philosophy on finding new drugs by saying that people who display rare physiological attributes, either beneficial or harmful, may be the key to our next blockbuster medicines.  He was referring to people who experience pain excessively and also people who don’t experience pain at all, who are extremely tall, who are resistant to deadly diseases like AIDS, or people who don’t age.  Hayden called these types of people black swans because, like their namesake, they exhibit traits that we never would have expected to exist.  That is, until the day we actually encountered people who have them.  

Perhaps the idea of developing drugs by studying black swans seems like no big deal to you.  Of course we discover new drugs by studying people with rare conditions, there’s nothing new about it, right?  The answer is somewhere between “sort of” and “no.”  Actually, new drugs are typically developed either by searching for molecules that can cause a beneficial-seeming effect in cells growing in a petri dish, or by testing large collections of drug-like molecules for their ability to target a protein that is thought to be important to a disease.  These approaches are problematic because they often lead to new drugs that are dangerous in humans, have major unintended effects, or simply don’t work.  Even a drug that perfectly targets a protein we think is important can be a failure, because targeting that protein in a human may lead to effects not encountered in the cells assayed.  It is because of such an unintended effect, for example, that the hypertension drug Sildenafil became the erection drug, Viagra.  

A black swan approach would be different.  The key to Hayden’s philosophy is that if we are able to identify the cause of a black swan trait and to perfectly target it with a new drug, then we already know what the side effects of the drug will be from the get-go.  The side effects, if there are any, should be readily apparent from observing the black swans after whom the drug was fashioned.  This idea isn’t just science fiction.  I mentioned before that there are certain otherwise healthy people who simply do not experience pain.  A black swan approach to developing a new pain medicine would involve identifying the mutated protein that causes this rare trait (if such can be found), and then developing a drug that makes this protein in normal people act like the mutated one. A well-targeted drug would have a very low chance of being harmful, because we already have examples of people who have this condition permanently, yet who display no seemingly adverse side effects.  In fact this example is real.  Drug makers are now developing a new class of highly effective, non-addictive painkillers based on this no-pain trait, which may soon be changing the lives of sufferers of chronic pain. 

There is another black swan named Brooke Greenberg, who may hold the secret to aging.  

Brooke enjoys being swung around in the air, playing with her sisters, crawling on the floor, giggling, and getting attention.  Do these activities seem strange for a twenty year old?  That’s because despite being twenty, Brooke stopped developing around the age of five, and still has the mentality and physical appearance of a toddler.  Her case has baffled doctor after doctor, and has led to stupefying interviews and media appearances by her family.  It’s too early to tell if Brooke Greenberg actually holds any keys to immortality, but it certainly appears that in some aspects of aging she has either stalled or has almost done so, which provides hope.  Taking a forever-young pill may be possible in the not-so-far future. 

The key then lies in being able to figure out what’s causing Brook’s condition.  If we can determine its cause, maybe we can develop drugs that can mimic it.  But the thing about black swan traits is that up until recently, we haven’t had a reliable way to figure out what was causing them.  We could do a battery of physiological tests, take blood samples, search for abnormal proteins or tissue functions, and write case studies, but these often just led to more head scratching or a long process of biological discovery, rather than a straightforward path to a cure.  

This whole process may be on the verge of an overhaul. 

In January, 2013, in an interview alongside Brooke’s family on the prime time show “Katie,” a geneticist at Mount Sinai Hospital named Eric Schadt explained that his group has sequenced Brooke’s genome, and is in the process of analyzing it for clues about aging.  

Until very recently, sequencing an individual’s genome would have been either impossible or prohibitively expensive.  Not so anymore.  A full human genome now can be sequenced with reasonable accuracy for something around 5 thousand dollars, down from 50 thousand dollars just in 2009, and hundreds of thousands or more just a few years before that.  This opens enormous new avenues for understanding black swans like Brooke Greenberg.  Many of the differences between her genome and a “normal” one will be readily apparent, and as more people’s genomes are sequenced as references, the differences will stand out more and more clearly.  Knowing these differences is the key to then developing cures.  

Of course, knowing what’s in the genome is only a part of the whole picture.  But, as Michael Hayden pointed out in his talk, there is a hidden advantage to the black swan approach over other drug discovery methods.  This is that when dealing with a black swan trait, we have a very good hunch before we even start drug development what a well-targeted drug would have as its side effects.  

The importance of knowing the side effects of a drug from the get-go cannot be overstated.  Developing drugs is almost inconceivably expensive -- in the neighborhood of four to eleven billion dollars per drug.  The majority of this cost is from the huge number of drugs that fail during clinical trials because they’re not safe, which in turn pump up the cost of the drugs that do make it.  Although it may not seem to matter how much drug companies pay to develop drugs, it matters hugely -- lowered cost could be a game changer, making drugs cheaper for consumers, and enabling drug companies to focus on many diseases that are not now on their radars because they simply aren’t cost effective.

Black swan-based drug discovery may be the ticket to reducing drug failures because of side effects, but black swans can sometimes portend some pretty serious side effects, too.  Brooke Greenberg is no exception.  First off, it may not be so simple to isolate Brooke’s anti-aging trait from fundamental and crippling developmental abnormalities, which have kept her not in the prime of her life, but as a toddler.  Secondly, Brooke has had a smorgasbord of medical complications, including stomach ulcers, seizures, a stroke, a brain tumor, and non-uniform tissue aging, which led to her esophagus closing and her needing to eat through a feeding tube.  These are discouraging.  Yet Brooke has also recovered from many of her complications astoundingly quickly, lest we forget that her body is harboring a great many secrets.  To some of these secrets, her genome sequence may yet reveal answers. 

Brooke Greenberg was born into an exciting age, in which a confluence of technology and knowledge has given a condition like hers a tremendous potential to help others.  It’s yet unclear if her condition will enable us to attack aging, but genome sequencing gives us a leg up on any other time in history, and we have reason for optimism.  Sequencing a person’s genome now costs on the order of Lasik eye surgery, and it’ll soon be much cheaper.  The possibilities are as numerous as the traits we can see in people around us.  We’ve really only just cracked open the doorway revealed by genomics, and the next leaps in medicine, in biology, in our very culture, may be incubating even now, somewhere, in the nest of a black swan.  

In Search of Proust's Way

“To admit you to the “little nucleus,” the “little group,” the “little clan” at the Verdurins’, one condition sufficed, but that one was indispensable: you must give tacit adherence to a Creed one of whose articles was that the young pianist whom Mme Verdurin had taken under her patronage that year and of whom she said “Really, it oughtn’t to be allowed, to play Wagner as well as that!” licked both Planté and Rubinstein hollow, and that Dr. Cottard was a more brilliant diagnostician than Potain.”

So begins part two of Swann’s way, the first one of the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In search of lost time.  Swann’s way was handed to me by my friend Hagai as he was packing his things several months ago to leave Israel.  “Take it,” he said.  “It’s a marvelous novel.  There are sections about nature, which are generally boring.  But the sections about society, relationships, and memory are exquisite.  I think you’ll find it worth your while.”  

Well it certainly was a while: it took me over two months to read.  But in sum, I also feel it was definitely worth it.  

Proust is notorious for being difficult, for being pretentious, and also, with his great novel often touted as the definitive masterpiece of modernist literature, for being one of the greatest writers in history.  In Search of Lost Time is the choice tome for many literati when asked the ‘what would you take to read if you were stuck on a desert island’ question.  But let’s discard these prejudices, because indeed when I approached Proust I didn’t really know what I was getting into.  All I had to go on was the recommendations of a close friend.

I finished Swann's way just this weekend, turning the last page with nostalgia almost as if I had relived a childhood.  As is true of the events of actual life, the most prominent feature of the earlier parts of the novel was not a collection of sharp instances or details, but rather a haze which is best defined by the emotions it has the power to conjure.  The book itself is, not surprisingly, Proustian (by this I refer to the principle of involuntary memory).  I couldn’t even recall the individual events of the novel which had conspired to generate this nostalgia in me, for many of them had been submerged into the atmosphere of the thing and were certainly not in themselves relevant.  Finishing it gave me the same longing and apprehension that one gets when approaching a life transition, or when saying adieu to a loved one.

But attaining this feeling came at a cost, for getting through the novel was, as it was promised to be… difficult.  

There are three sections to Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Swann’s way: Combray, Swann in Love, and Place-Names: The Name.  

Combray was the tough one.  There were vignettes in it that kept me happily reading, but those were interspersed between long slogs.  Comprising sometimes dozens of pages of florid description with no plot, the slogs were equally abstruse as they were slow.  The whole book is, in fact, written in long, periodic, convoluted sentences that use a vocabulary of the very highest English, all of which requires rather a lot of attention to follow.  (I’m strange in that I actually particularly liked this).  Proust is not to be read by the impatient or the attention deficit.  Despite all this, and because I glimpsed brilliance in certain segments of Combray, I never seriously considered putting the book down.  But I wasn’t sure if I would ever really get into it, or rather if the book would remain as merely a time-consuming curiosity in my life-history of reading.  

All of that changed with the sentence that I pasted at the top of this blog post.  Within pages of starting part two (Swann in Love), I was mesmerized.  A two month journey had gotten me through the 264 pages of Combray, but I swept through the 279 pages of Swann in Love in about 4 days.  Consider that the sentence at the start of this blog is neither more nor less complex than the average sentence in the Swann’s Way, and you will understand that I must have been very engaged to have done this.  

I thought then that Combray should simply be skipped, because it and Swann in Love don't really need each other.  However, I’m not so sure now.  The last, short section of the book, with the awful name Place-Names: The Name (which I’m guessing comes from a clunky translation of the French), evokes both Combray and Swann in Love and creates certain images which, without the context of Combray, would lack the lingering depth perhaps best characterized by feeling something just at the tip of your tongue, which you just can't quite put a name on.  I was impressed by the crafting of this emotion, and I realized that without Combray, the effect would have been thinner.

Combray focused on the narrator’s childhood, and, like childhood itself, was richer in impressions than in happenings.  The very fact that it was difficult, that it took a long time to get through, also played a role in its power.  The focus, like childhood’s, wasn’t on plot, but rather on an experience that is often characterized by its very lack of occurrences.  The book purposely slowed me down, and forced me into its own, drawn out pace.  Only because of that was I able to relish the ending, for I felt as if I had been on some sort of a journey by the time that I got there, with its slow and its faster bits, which is ultimately more similar to life than is any pulp or, indeed, the majority of the media of modern consumption.  

Proust is not an author who I feel will appeal all too easily to most modern readers, because, like the literature we have demanded and received, we order our emotions in digestible bites.  Proust couldn’t have cared less about word counts or succinctness, which sets him at odds with nearly all modern authors.  We live in a world now in which attention is one of the greatest currencies, and grabbing the attention of a consumer is so critical that most of the art about us is designed to first draw us in, and then, perhaps, to release its slower and subtler influences.  Without the marketing feature at the outset, these works would simply be ignored.  Who has the time to read something that doesn’t get right to the point?

But there is a value in not getting to the point, because life itself doesn’t get to the point, either.  Proust certainly could have managed to tell the same story in less or in simpler words, but I don’t believe he even would have wanted to.  If you are to appreciate this book’s merits, you are to surrender to Proust’s meanderings, and you are to trust him that these meanderings will be worthwhile.  If you don’t trust him, don’t start.  I believe that Proust wanted to capture the moments he described in his story as if they were emotional photographs, and to a large degree, difficult as it is, I believe he succeeded.

I have enough faith in Proust now that I'm ready to follow him through another 6 volumes.  The end of Swann's way leaves me feeling satisfied but as if the ground has been set for something far bigger.  Hopefully I can manage to get my hands on the rest of the set before I ever get stranded on some desert island…  

Knafeh Ninja Whomp

   Roman [3:50p,12/27/2012]: Yo! What time ur going today?   
   Me    [3:59p,12/27/2012]: Yoyo, maybe 7?   
   Roman [3:59p,12/27/2012]: Yap

My hand quivered over my mouse.  Milky brown coffee residue lined my porcelain cup, and sugar crystals were splayed over the saucer.  Too many coffees.  I tried to concentrate on my work but my hand kept drifting back to my phone, and my eyes to the clock.  Just a couple more tasks...

I raced out of work as soon as I could, ran after the bus and just barely caught it, and, after gathering my climbing gear, rolled my bike out of my flat within minutes. Halfway to the climbing gym, I felt my pants buzzing.  Jeremy was calling me.

“Hey, I’m here already,” he said.

“I’ll be there in three minutes,” I replied, huffing.

“Okay--I’m waiting outside.”

I squeezed the phone back into my pocket and pedaled the rest of the way there.  And--there was Jeremy, dressed in what could have been breakdancing attire, a baby-sized yellow pack on his back, and his goateed face breaking into a broad grin.  We hugged. Electronic music pumped out of the climbing gym in an overwhelming volume.  

“Whoa it’s loud!” I yelled.

“Yea, they’ve been playing around with the volume since I got here!” He yelled back.  

“Come on!” 

Escorting Jeremy into a climbing gym is like bringing a child into a cookie factory.  But tonight the gym’s owner was throwing a party, so aside from the live DJ making the place whomp, there were also a gazillion people.  We wove through the crowds.  Jeremy’s pupils dilated at the first sight of climbing holds.  The moment reminded me of a long time ago, back when Jeremy and I used to visit playgrounds and climbing walls and muck about trying to climb everything in sight.  We were just kids then.  We grew up together in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a big part of our childhood involved sleeping over at friends’ houses and making up breakdance moves or climbing on trees or over fences or trying amateur parkour.  I stuck with climbing while Jeremy merely continued to dabble in everything, his natural talents sufficient to keep him happily lazy.  

Pretty soon though we were hopping around the climbing gym just like kids again.  Jeremy had his smartphone out and was taking photos and videos, in between traversing the wall on big jugs.  I was doing some warmup dynos.  “Do that move again,” he said to me at one point, breathing hard and holding the camera up.  I tried jumping to a blunt grey sloper, slipped off, and rolled onto my back on the mat.  Just as I stood up I felt a large hand grasp my shoulder, and when I turned around there was Roman, tall and hunched and wearing a crooked grin and a grey hooded jacket, his hair as disheveled as ever.  

“Romansky!” I shouted.  “C’mon, I’ve got to introduce you.  This is my friend Jeremy I grew up with…”

Everyone showed up over the next hour.  There was Dana, red hair knotted tightly to her head and eyebrow ring gleaming as she wrinkled her brows and narrowed her eyes and struck an aggressive pose, and then broke it up with a huge smile and bear hugged me.  Iv, insouciant as ever, sauntered in slapping five and saying what’s up to half the people he passed.  He saw me and Roman and dropped his head and chuckled.  His dark bangs curled down over his eyes.  Then he opened his long arms wide and hugged each of us.  Marina moseyed in and, seeing us, gave a little body wiggle and laughed.  When Moriel and Claire showed up, Claire butted me out of the way and hugged Jeremy.  “You must be Jeremy.  It’s so nice to finally meet you!”  Moriel and I shrugged and went for the beer.  Pretty soon Jeremy was cracking jokes with everyone and telling stories about our youth.  I felt a little warmth inside.  It was rare to be able to share a night like this with such an old friend, and to have it all in such a good spirit.  He and my Tel Aviv crew were already getting along swimmingly.

We all climbed for a few hours but beer eventually took precedence, and the mood went from athletic to party.  The energy in the place rose along with the music, and the lights dropped.  Finally, the inside of the gym evolved into a club scene.  By then I was out in the back with most of my friends, licking my fingers clean of hamburger juice and chomping potato chips.  

“I don’t want to push anything, but there’s a whole bunch of ladies in there dancing, and that isn’t going to last forever…” Jeremy said.  I nodded at him.  The two of us hopped up and joined the mixed hiphop and trance groove, and within minutes, all of our friends had joined in as well.  And then, as if some signal had spontaneously struck inside of everyone’s skull, it seemed that the whole party burst at once onto the dancefloor.  I thought back over some of the more outrageous moments from our little community, and I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised to see all of these folks busting a move--

--not, at least, considering our trips down to Timna, which included a whole carnival of colorfully garbed characters descending upon a red desert setting for Purim, spending our days exploring sandstone blocks and our evenings bouldering by headlamp in full costume, and eating the delicious all-Israeli dutch-oven stew called poike.  Not to mention the Israeli bouldering competition, and my friends’ devious and wildly successful scheme to get everyone, guys and girls, dressed up in 80’s style spandex--

--I looked about me again, feeling the bass whump.  There was Jeremy doing the robot, as pneumatic as a collection of steam pistons; and next to him Iv, doing his best to teach me the shuffle, his big arms and long body flailing about like comedy props; and there was Claire, thrusting and thumping, her look saying “This is my dancefloor,” just before she broke into a sheepish grin; not to mention Ayelet pulling out some of her old Electro-party dance moves; and finally Valerie and Rony and others, faces lit up with laughter, and their bodies a blur.

The dancing eventually died down and then ended, and we all hung out and chattered and played acro yoga games for a while.  Finally, Jeremy was off, with a hug and a promise to meet up back in Raleigh.  “We haven’t partied like that since… well, ever,” he said.  The rest of us dispersed soon after in various directions.  

But the weekend was only just started.

   Roman [1:47p,12/28/2012]: Shall I get a crate of beer?
   Me    [1:49p,12/28/2012]: This is IV.  Beer!!! 

The next evening, I found myself swooshing off with the same crew towards the outdoor climbing area Ein Fara for the annual Israeli climbing festival, Festipus.  We arrived just in time to grab dinner.  There was a chill in the air that hovered just outside of our down jackets, but the mood was festive, with people all about the campground playing guitars, talking, laughing, and sharing stories and jokes.  

Within a few minutes my friends had all frozen in place in a circle, exhaled breaths curling up into mist, the only motion an occasional arm swiping down towards a stray hand.  We were playing ninja, a game in which we take turns trying to slap each other’s hands with minimal extraneous movement, with two slapped hands meaning you’re out.

We had played this game with increasing vigor on each climbing trip that we’d taken over the last year, and by now, it had taken on a nearly archetypal significance.  Iv was here on the ground crawling between someone’s legs, there sliding back to back with an enemy, and finally was stretched wide in the center of the circle, arms tauntingly close to the other players, posture deliberate and exaggerated.  Yonat, sweet looking but with a catlike ferocity, moved in brief spurts which always ended in loud cries from victims and winces from onlookers.  Dana kept a low profile but now and again pulled a zinger out of her puffy jacket sleeve.  And then there was little Rony, as silent and deadly as a possum. Our fun caught on and a couple of traveling Americans, as well as a bunch of Israelis, joined in with us.  At one point we had fifteen people in the circle and a number of onlookers cheering.  Ninja shifted to zoo, to charades and to cowboys and princesses, and other pantomime games.  We were almost unable to breathe through our laughter.  

The next day dawned cold, and after wiping sleep from our eyes, we all got down to the serious business of rockclimbing.  Crisp winter air kept the wall just cool enough for good friction.  Iv and I climbed a few steep and pumpy routes in between breaks to drink coffee and greet friends from different areas of Israel.  The day swept in and then out and, before we knew it, we were stopping in a small Arab village for a hummus on the way back to Tel Aviv.  

Because Roman was driving, we had to go into the sweets shop across the street after our hummus to eat Knafeh, an arab treat consisting of sweet goat cheese and a gooey orange rose-flavored syrup-soaked straw-noodle topping, sprinkled with pistachios.  “It’s not Yefet street, but it’s really good--you must eat this one,” he said.  We tried three varieties, each one of them sweeter and more delectable than the last, and followed them with Turkish coffees.  Five minutes later I was dead asleep in the back of the car.  

I woke up when we dropped off our first passenger, Ayelet.  I waved weakly at her.  Next was Iv.  I was awake enough then to get out of the car, and we slapped five and both said simultaneously “New years” and grinned.  Next was Marina, who was leaving the next morning on a month-long trip in Mexico.  Roman and I hugged her goodbye and wished her safe travels.  And finally it was just me and Roman in the car, both wearing lazy smiles.  We drove in silence for a few minutes.  

It was only seven o'clock, but my body was wracked from a weekend of nonstop action and rockclimbing, and from barely sleeping.  But I couldn’t have thought of a better way in which to have spent it.  There was something special here, now, with this group of people.  Kind of a resonance.  

Roman nodded, feeling the same mood.  And then he said: “Don’t worry man, this isn’t it.  There will be more of these.”  

I took a deep breath and felt the hum of the engine.  I knew it was true, and I knew that it wasn’t.  But there’s nothing to do but to grasp on to these moments as they’re happening.  After all, they each but occur once.  

We slapped five and I got out of the car.  I grabbed my pack, shut the door and waved.  I watched Roman pull out of the spot and drive off.  And I went up to my flat, exhausted and happy.  Just in need of a little sleep before the next big adventure.

Magical Rohrer

From watching a few of his interviews and playing his games, I must say that Jason Rohrer is a guy I would like to sit down and have a beer with.

Rohrer is thirty five-ish, blond, square-jawed, and has startling blue eyes.  His hair seems perennially sloppy, as if it won’t be tamed no matter how long or short it’s cut.  It’s the look of a natural grunge musician.  His surprisingly large head sort of floats about over his thin neck like the head of a marionette, bobbing and weaving about with his words, which bunch together in quick spurts.  It’s a manic dance of excitement.  He speaks quickly about infinite recursion and creativity and biased data sharing and the lower limit of what we would call communication, and by the end you find yourself bobbing along with him a little bit too, because his enthusiasm is infectious.  Or maybe it’s because you're a little intrigued...

Jason Rohrer is an artist and a computer game designer, although I would emphasize the former and say that the latter is simply his medium.  If you’ve ever turned your nose up at video games, or you don’t see the value in them, I beseech you to try the ones he made.  You still may not like them (and I warn you, these games aren’t designed to be fun), but I guarantee that they’ll at least make you think a little differently.  The games I recommend you to play are these:

Passage is about life.  Will you travel through it alone or with a partner?  Will you take an easy road or a more tricky one?  What kinds of challenges will you take, and what will you give up in the process?  And what’s the point of it all anyways?

Gravitation is about creativity.  Have you ever had moments of genius, and then the times when it all crashes down on you?  Have you ever struggled with the tradeoff between work and play, brainstorming and implementing, taking on more exciting challenges versus finishing the ones you’re immersed in?  So has Jason Rohrer.  I bet you’ve never experienced it like this before.  

Sleep is Death is about…?  Okay I admit, I haven’t played it.  But I watched the cool intro slideshow, and I’m intrigued enough that I want to.

These games (at least the first two) are free and quick... they’ll take you less than ten minutes to play.  They’re purposely philosophical and exploratory rather than entertaining.  You can collect points in these games but really what you’re going to want to do is to understand the nuances of their mechanics, because, well, that’s what the games are really about.  It’s not the contents nor the graphics (don’t expect much) but their physics through which the games build into allegories.  

And when I say that you’ve never played games like these, I really mean it.  There’s very little else I’ve seen to compare them to, and I feel they have more in common with Avante Garde art than with other video games (although admittedly, I’m not really a gamer… perhaps there is other stuff like this out there?).  

There's something else about these games.  In an age when all of our technology is tremendously slick, it can be shocking when we encounter something that isn’t.  Rohrer cuts right to the heart of it.  He doesn't waste a spare pixel.  His games show that beauty is in the crafting and not in the polish, for of polish there is none here, but I don’t feel these games miss it.  Take a few minutes to check them out and I think you'll be glad that you did.

Elderly shmelderly

What should I do with my elderly vegetables?

I had a pile of them in front of me this morning, from the rather fresh to the marginally edible.  I sorted them into groups.  One group was for the dumpster.  This included a few moldy tomatoes and eggplants.  Then there was another group which looked healthy and fine.  Those were the obvious keepers.  But between them was the third group--the wrinkled old ones.  These ones had velvety skins.  They looked like they had been through rough days, and had stories to tell.  In fact, I know that some of them did.  

That red bell pepper had gotten sliced back in his prime, when he was a young chap full of ego and crunch.  I had enjoyed his fragrance and his crispness then.  Next to him was the twisted orange pepper, a bad little man who carried just the whiff of heat to keep it interesting, but who most of all was surprisingly tangy and sweet.  He had completed one of my salads.  And the onion, oh so neglected.  “You eat my friends all the time,” he seemed to whine, “but little old me, you just stuck me in the back of the fridge and forgot about me, didn’t ya.”  He had shriveled away from his old purple luster, down and down into a tight and curled knot.  I could see the disregard on him, layers which had softened or peeled away and were useless.  He didn’t look appetizing.  

I stalled.  I picked the veggies up and got ready to trash them, but, not being able to bring myself to it, I put them back down again.  The silly thing was, I had all of the same vegetables in my “fresh” group.  I didn’t need these.  On the counter nearby there were two red bell peppers, the color of wine and nearly exploding out of their smooth folds with young pride.  Right next to them sat a spotless orange pepper, the same variety as that old grizzled hothead who had livened up my salad.  And on my spice shelf were a few onions, lording about like they owned the place.  

But now I had these chaps who were wrinkled but edible, which had shriveled up but not rotted, and who seem to stare at me with their vegetable eyes and say “what about us?”  I watched them and they watched me.  They never blinked.  Finally, giving in, I started slicing them.  Today I would make my eggs using only the elderly ones, and we’d have to just see.

So I’m taking my breakfast now on the balcony of my building, up the stairwell, with my feet propped up on the railing and a cup of coffee.  The vegetables are good.  They seem to have mellowed out but gained a wider spectrum flavors with their age, making it worth chewing more at each bite.  I’m glad that I chose them.  It’s a chilly day and it’s Shabbat so the neighborhood’s pulse is pretty tame now, with just some tourists and a few locals walking dogs or strolling, and some crazy fat lady going up and down the street singing nonsense.  I am struck by the fact that just over two weeks ago, I was in the same stairwell as this balcony, hiding from rockets, and now I’m mostly concerned about the fate of my elderly vegetables.  

I think back and yes, maybe one of these veggies was even around then.  Well, I’m not sure.  The conflict with Hamas feels like it never happened, almost, just as these veggies, so precious when I first sliced them, sat forgotten in a cold place while my life swished away elsewhere.  It’s strange just how quickly and fully we can forget things.  I just celebrated a birthday, so I guess I’m thinking a bit more about it right now.  I hope that I’ll age well, like these veggies.  Well, look at me… now I’m getting all sentimental.  Seeing anything that has been left forgotten strikes a chord with me.  To curl up alone in the refrigerator is a sad fate for a bell pepper.  

Breakfast is done.  I’ve finished all of my old guys, and it’s only the young guns left over in my apartment now.  Will I eat them fresh?  Will they end up neglected, too?  Who’s to say?  One day at a time, little fellas.  I’m off to life, to hopefully scooping up a few more flavors myself on the big journey.  I have a lot more to do out there.  Gotta get it all while it's hot, while there's still sizzle in the pan.  After all, one day I, too, will be an elderly vegetable.

Beyond rockets

The bus bombing this afternoon made this a whole lot more terrifying.

Apparently somebody came onto a bus with a special package and dropped it off, and then ran away.  The bomb exploded and injured about 21 people (the numbers in the reports keep changing, so we don't know yet for sure how many or how serious).  This happened on Shaul Hamelech street in central Tel Aviv.  I’ve made a few maps so you can understand what the geography of all of this looks like, since it’s probably hard for people who’ve never been here to know what “Tel Aviv” means, regarding what it means for a bus to blow up in Tel Aviv, how close Tel Aviv is to Gaza, etc.  

Map 1 shows my usual stomping ground.  The red line on the right is the street where the bus blew up today.  I pointed out where I live and where Moriel and Claire (very close friends of mine) live, so people have a sense of perspective.  I also pointed out a few of our favorite bars. 

Map 2 is a bit more zoomed out.  In the maps that follow, a blue box shows where the borders of the last map were, so you can get a better sense of your bearings.  I've outlined what most people consider central Tel Aviv in red, and I've kept on the highlighting of the street where the bus blew up.  I also marked Tel Aviv University, where I am now and where I work.

Map 3 is a bit more zoomed out and you can see the relative locations of Holon, Tel Aviv, and Rishon LeTsiyon.  Holon and Rishon are sites of recent damage from rocket attacks.

In Map 4, you can see Rehovot, where Moriel works (at the Weizmann Institute), and Ashdod.  Ashdod has been under continual bombardment since this thing started, and for the last few years it's sustained rocket attacks on a regular basis.

Map 5 brings Gaza, Ashkelon, and Beer Sheva into the picture.  Ashkelon and Beer Sheva have been under continual fire.  Also, Jerusalem shows up on the right.  A couple of Hamas missiles have landed near there during this conflict, including one yesterday right before Ban Ki Moon of the UN arrived.

And here's the same map of Israel right next to an equally scaled map of the New York Met area.  I put a red line so you can see the distance missiles are flying between Gaza and Tel Aviv, compared with an equivalent distance in New York.  It's as if Manhattan were being fired at from East Brunswick.  I mean, I know that there's a rivalry between New York and New Jersey, but come on now...

The bus bombing was shocking and a whole new type of buzz went over my friends when we heard about it.  It seems this was a lone actor... Hamas did not claim responsibility.  We shall hope that this was an isolated incident.  Even more than the rocket attacks, many of my Israeli friends seemed to take this as a matter of course, while Americans I've spoken to, including myself, were more shocked.  I guess that it takes living through a few bombings to get used to it...  

By the way, an Israeli news site to watch for very up to date news is Ynet:

http://www.ynetnews.com/.

Thanks for your thoughts everybody.

Fajr fajr burning bright…

For the first siren I was on a bus with my laundry.  

The bus suddenly stopped and three or four Israelis bounded off of it, as if they were late for an appointment or the world were about to explode.  The rest of the people on the bus stayed sitting as if nothing were happening, which, not having a clue what was happening, is what I did too.  The bus started up again a few seconds later and then opened its doors and a few people ran back on, and then we continued on our merry way.  While we roared down Rothschild in the series of feints and weaves that is the terrifying norm of Israeli driving, I got a call from my friend Raphy asking if I had heard the siren and knew what to do if I heard one.  I hadn’t, and I didn’t -- but I learned what to do then.  

I was calm until I got to the laundry café and the barrista exclaimed “why are you doing your laundry when we almost just got blown up?!”  I thought the response was a little extreme and told her so, but I didn’t realize yet that an actual missile had been intercepted somewhere in the vicinity of Tel Aviv.  And yet… I still thought her response was a bit excessive.  

I did my laundry.  Plenty of other folks were in the café, too.  I met my friend Iv for a beer afterwards.  It was a quiet night, but people were still out.  That was last Thursday, the first day that a live missile siren had sounded in Tel Aviv in decades, and people were a bit shocked.  But the danger then, and still now, is rather minimal.  We all do what we can.  We keep the windows cracked so we’ll hear any sirens, and we pay close attention to any high pitched wails.  If an alarm sounds we go to the stairwell, or the basement, or whatever the safest place is.  But we all have the choice: we can play the role of a victim of terror and actually be terrified by this stuff, or we can do the rational thing and continue on with our lives.  I, along with most Israelis, choose the latter.  

You see, Hamas sends missiles not to kill people but to scare them, and it’s amazing what they can achieve with a single rocket.  One missile which is sure to be shot down by the Iron Dome, several million Israelis potentially terrified.  But the bang is much louder than the bite.  Nothing has hit Tel Aviv so far.  Even if something did, the chance of someone getting hurt is much lower than from many other forms of sudden death -- cardiac arrest, allergic reactions, car crashes or bike collisions or other accidents.  If you want to increase your safety in this city, you’re better off choosing the salad over the falafel rather than gnashing your teeth over missiles.  Even the same is true in the south of the country, where many hundreds of missiles have fallen in the last days.  There have been very few deaths, just a continual bombardment of fear.  And that fear is the point of it all.  

In truth, I feel much worse for Southern Israelis now than for us in Tel Aviv, and much, much worse for the citizens of Gaza.  People in Gaza are dealing with hell from both directions.  Their leaders have done their best to screw them, and the Israelis are now punishing them for Hamas’s mistakes as well.  The point of this blog isn’t to get political, so I’ll stop there.  But it is just amazing to me how futile and empty this whole thing is.  Nobody wins here.  People die, and stuff is blown up, international opinion swings towards Israel and then against it as unintended civilian targets are inevitably hit, and the cycle rolls on and on.  This is a power theater like all of the other turns of the screw, in which there is no political or military endpoint, just an escalation towards a new equilibrium upon which the governing engines on both sides are striving desperately to gain the upper hand.  We’re all meanwhile being driven full tilt into a pillar of cast lead.  Everything happening just makes the crap more entrenched.  There is no movement, only stasis.  This is the circular madness of Middle East logic.  

But I digress.  The night after the first siren went off, I drove North with a group of friends to go rockclimbing and camping for the weekend.  I actually wasn’t in Tel Aviv at all when the sirens went off on Friday and Saturday.  On Sunday I felt unwell so I slept in until around 10:30am, when I awoke from a siren.  I was out of bed, dressed, and in the stairwell in less than a minute, with a few seconds to spare before the siren stopped and I heard a loud double kaboom.  Moriel and I spoke on the phone afterwards and discussed what we’d heard and where the sound seemed to come from, and what news reports we had read about it.  It’s like a game -- siren, run for cover, kaboom, return to normal activities, talk to friends, and then check the news incessantly until something comes up.  You don’t really know what happened exactly until you see the report that the missile was shot down by the Iron Dome, or it landed in an empty field, or whatever.  That’s part of the whole psychological toll of this.  It’s the uncertainty of it.

The last siren in Tel Aviv (so far) was later on Sunday.  I went out into the stairwell along with a bunch of my neighbors and my friend Hagai who was over, and we all crouched or leaned against the walls until we heard the kaboom.  There is a thrill that runs through your spine when that blast goes, something instinctive about feeling the earth tremble.  But that terror was gone for me almost as instantly as it began.  The blast was assurance that we were still fine.  

All of these strangers, crouching together in a “safe place”, waiting patiently for the blast so they can get on with it--it’s surreal and actually rather awkward.  How serious or scared ought we act?  We are all sitting there, we’ve been told to stay for six minutes after the blast in case there’s another, but… really?  I mean, it’s like a bunch of grown men and women playing hide and go seek.  After the blast, it’s obvious that it’s over.  That moment passed, and we dispersed.  I got on with my night.  I even slept really well last night.  But I confess that i’ve had trouble concentrating for checking the news today…

Different people react differently.  Some of my friends have gotten scared, and some are totally cool.  Some also find humor in it.  The important thing is that we’re safe, and life is going on in Tel Aviv, if not with its usual velocity, at least with some momentum.  People are a bit more subdued.  There are less people out at night.  But the Iron Dome works, and Hamas has pretty minimal capabilities to hit Tel Aviv now, and for the short-term, nothing is happening here.  Please know that, and turn your worry to the South.  That’s where the war is going on.  And I feel for them--we can all hope it’ll end soon.