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.    

Purple like RUN!

Dana grinned at me over a stuffed chicken sandwich, tahini dripping onto the grimy concrete floor, as I held my own sandwich over a plate of olives.  We were propped up on stools in the claustrophobic passage between the chicken grill, the baklava stand, and the main artery of the Tel Aviv shuk, right in front of that amazing Costa Rican coffeshop.  Cappuccinos were in our near future.

“So tell me about your trip,” she asked, wiping some spare sauce away.  “What’s it like being back in Israel again after almost a month in the US.”

I sat for a while, orange tinted tahini dripping onto my plate, as the whole journey, the whole feel of it, coursed back through me.  What kind of summary can capture such a thing?  This trip was relaxing and cathartic, and it left me wanting for words.  Part of what I had done on the trip was to deliberately not over-think it.  But when it came down to it, there was a theme even to my half-formed ponderings.  Namely, I had thought a lot on this trip about culture.  

It was the chilled out attitude of rockclimbers living in an old, broken down house in Fayetteville, West Virginia, because it’s the lifestyle, man; a friend transitioning towards family life, deep in the conservative old South, and reminiscing over bygone days not so long gone; the worldliness of some of my graduate school buddies, who have since moved on to new urban habitats; and the various lifestyles that my oldest friends have set their sights on, have grown into, or have grown out of.  And all of this contrasted to the just-beneath-the-skin pressure that pervades Israel.  Like the time a guy slammed on the brakes, honked for ten seconds straight, and then pulled over and took the extra time out to scream at me because I had crossed the street (legally) in front of him.  Culture, and decisions.  And…  back to Israel… 

“Well,” I finally said, “the truth is, I had a chance to become reacclimated to Israeli culture before I even got back here.”  The story had just popped into my head -- probably because it had just recently happened -- and as I looked up, I saw Dana was waiting for me to continue.  So I went for it.  “It all started on the air train in Frankfurt airport…”      

***

It all started on the air train in Frankfurt airport, when a little old lady with curled purple hair leaned close in towards me and asked through a thick accent: “are you going to Israel?”  I had no Hebrew writing anywhere on me and I was nowhere near the gate for my flight, so I was surprised to be suddenly asked that.  But in fact she was right, I was going to Israel.  She sounded Israeli and anyway didn’t seem menacing, so I said yes, I’m going to Israel.  And, being still in America mode, I gave her a smile.  

Now--I have the excuse that I was nowhere near the El Al terminal, so I hadn’t prepared myself yet for encounters such as this one.  But the real truth is that I had been away from Israel long enough that I had become rusty.  It took very little time for me to realize my mistake.  It was as simple as this: one should never smile nor be overly friendly to an elderly female Israeli stranger.   

And here’s why.  With my response, her cheeks bundled up and her eyes sparkled.  I should have caught all of the signs right there, but I was not on my game.  She began with a few softballs.  She asked me where I had been, and I answered: North Carolina.  She asked sweetly what I’ll be doing in Israel, and I said: I’m a scientist, doing post-doctoral research.  And then the barrage came.  Oh, a post-doc!  how old are you?  Which University?  Do you like Tel Aviv?  You live with roommates or alone?  Do you have any family in Israel?  No family?!  Where do your parents live!  How did they end up there?  What do they do?  What do you think of Obama?  

By now she was getting aggressive, and she started interlacing her questions with irrational opinions like: “that Obama hates Israel -- I don’t trust him because he’s a Muslim.”  You see, in the US we’re taught to be polite to the elderly.  We smile and nod and try not to contradict them too hard.  And this is precisely why elderly Israeli women are so goddamned dangerous.  Because while we’re doing our best to be gentle, they’re busy mincing us into strudel meat.  And that’s about how it was looking inside that air train right as we missed the stop for our terminal, and I realized I would be stuck with her for another complete cycle.  I started grinding my teeth.  Now she was narrating the trajectory of our train in real time.  She started talking trash about Germans (I quickly looked around and assured myself we were the only two people in the compartment).  Oh, and now she switched to insulting Americans (they’re not genuine like Israelis, you know?).  And there, she proclaimed that Romney deserves to pay lower taxes than most of America, because he’s a businessman (?!).  Then purple hair leaned in close enough to me that I could smell the garlic on her, and said “I have a daughter.  She’s a doctor, and she’s goooorgeous.”  Her eyes roved over me hungrily.  “It’s too bad that she’s already married.”  When the door to the air train finally opened, I practically burst down the stairs as she went for the elevator.  

But when I got to the gate security for the El Al flight, purple hair was not far behind.  I answered my security questions as quickly as possible, scuttled through the metal detector, and took out a book, but as soon as she came through she plopped down just a few seats away from me and started complaining to me about Obama again, all with a crooked smile on her face that said: “I’m old and sweet, so you’re not allowed to be rude to me.”  Then she transitioned to complaining about the US education system and proclaiming that Israeli rudeness (her words) is good and it’s a shame that American children behave well.  I held my book up in between us, but it might as well have been a sign that said “welcome, please speak to me.”  Finally she stood up, walked around a bit, and then sat down again even closer.  

She was in the midst of trying to convince me that rich people have it harder than poor people (yes, I’m serious) when I saw some movement at the plane portal, and I made an upbeat comment about boarding.  She replied: “Oh, I understand, you’re trying to get rid of me.”  She watched me for a second as I resisted the urge to nod.  “I can’t blame you,” she continued.  “We’re a different generation.  It’s okay, I won’t be offended -- I’ll go sit by myself.” And there it was: the guilt card.  I knew that she would eventually pull it.  Thank god when she finally got up to board.  

When I got on the plane, I hurried past her row, and then was lucky to find I had three seats to myself.  But the situation changed when the stewardesses guided another elderly Israeli woman to one of my spare seats.  About a minute in, the woman tried to make eye contact with me.  In that critical instant, I plastered my face to the window, began humming, and pulled my hood up over my head.  And if that wouldn’t do it…  

***

I had apparently gotten quite into the story, because Dana’s sandwich was done and I hadn’t even unwrapped mine.  I peeled down the wax paper and took a big, juicy bite.  

“Aww, I don’t think you did wrong,” she said.  “I would have acted the same way with that woman.  I can just see it, though, that purple hair… I missed your stories, man.”  She was smiling widely.  

I took another bite and responded.  “Yea, but you’re not a young American guy.  It’s ridiculous.  I learned in the very start to avoid these things.  Do you know how many older Israeli women have tried to set me up with their daughters?”

“Well, anyway, I think you did okay.  It’s hard to resist one of those cute old ladies.”  

I harrumphed through another mouthful of food.  I was a little disappointed in myself, actually, since my story had had nothing to do with my thoughts about culture.  But I couldn’t think of any real insights to tell Dana.  It was all too fresh, perhaps, and I hadn’t been back long enough for my thinking to crystallize.  But during my trip in the US I had also had trouble forming really cohesive thoughts when people asked me about Israel.  I would tell them I was enjoying it, but I couldn’t articulate what it really felt like here, or how it was different.  For example, this quiet hustle in the Shuk just before everything closes down for Shabbat.  You can’t explain this thing, but you can feel it.  

What it comes down to is that culture is a damn difficult thing to describe.  Maybe that’s because it only exists in the collisions between people and places and circumstances, which can have their own weird, indescribable logic.  But trying to describe culture is a bit like trying to describe music.  You kind of have to be there right then to truly grok it, and at its core, culture is composed of countless of these then-and-there instances.  Telling stories is at least a beginning.  Perhaps by describing enough individual encounters, there’s a chance of expressing a bit of the shape of the thing. 

I had finished my sandwich, and I was downing the water that the vendor had finally given me (after I had asked about eight times).  Dana and I looked at each other and we almost simultaneously said “coffee?”  It was time for the best cappuccino in town.  We balled up our wax papers and I picked up my vegetable-filled backpack, and we slid through the thin passage towards the coffeeshop.  

As we walked, and as I started to feel a little bit better about the relevance of old purple hair, I said: “By the way, I just thought of a couple more stories…”  

The Daemon's Logic

Ben was a middle-aged guy, thin, with grey hair pulled back into a tight ponytail and strained neck ligaments.  I met him in the Mud House café in Charlottesville when I used to go there and grade engineering exams, and he took an instant liking to me, partially because my papers had differential equations on them, and partially because I was able to nod at the right times when he spoke to me.  But I have to be honest here.  I think he also liked me because I was probably one of the very few people willing to listen to him.  

Ben was obsessed, and after years of working on the same exact thing, he had become so immersed in it that it was his world.  His obsession was logic.  When I met him, he let me flip through the eighty-five-odd pages of a logical proof that he was building to show that… I don’t know, I never understood.  I just knew that there was a book on the foundations of logic that had extremely difficult and mostly unsolved problems in it, and Ben had set out to rigorously solve every one of them.  So far, he had spent seven years on it.  The book, and the logic, was his life’s work.  

When I think of Ben I always think of geniuses like Einstein and Newton, artists like Picasso and Van Gogh, and writers like Hemingway and Faulkner: the greats after whom I would fashion my own destiny, were only crafting a legacy that simple.  These men were utterly obsessed with their craft, very much like Ben.  So what, if anything, set them apart?  Was there some sort of invisible daemon inside each of them which dictated what feats they could achieve?  Or was their success merely a matter of hard work?  And anyway, who was to say before all the dust had settled whether, forging off into the crypts of their own dusty logic books, these men would achieve anything other than delusion?  I don’t think it’s possible to have known, which means that these men dove headfirst into their paths without a clue of the outcome.  Perhaps it is that boldness in itself which led to their greatness.

Ben once told me about his talks with a few other logicians, university professors who scoffed at the style and form of his work.  They don’t get it, he proclaimed, with a heat in his eyes.  Other logicians use language that’s obfuscated and incomprehensible, while I write my proofs in plain English.  How can you follow a proof where the terms aren’t defined rigorously in natural language?  You can’t!  I didn’t know enough about his field to judge for myself the quality of his proofs, but when established practitioners of a craft disregard someone’s work because it is done in a strange way, I’m usually suspect.  But then again, it is they who work outside of a paradigm who have the power to overturn it, and delusion is only considered such until it turns out that the person is right.  

The question is, how far outside of paradigms ought we to go?  Life is uncertain and we only get one of them.  If we’re unwilling to ever step outside of the patterns set by others, we will certainly achieve nothing.  But step too far outside, fall too deeply into our own books about logic, and we’ll soon find that the life we left behind us is no longer available.  No matter what we do, we are going to be choosing some paths and giving up others, and the heftier our ambition, the farther away from the coffeeshop we’ll go when we delve in.  We must ask ourselves: how deep of a tome are we willing to open?  And then, having opened it, will we have the guts, the skill, and the dedication, to go all the way?