Who are you people?

So I just took a look at the analysis tools on my blog counter thingy, and it seems that there are folks reading this blog from all over–in addition to my beloved friends and family, there are people logging in from Alberta, Canada; Hungary; Lebanon; Atlanta GA; Kentucky; all over Israel, and even the few parts of California in which I don’t know anybody.

Granted, most of these could be people who were trying to find indiscreet photos of the Olsen twins or something.

Since the comments page is generally pretty quiet, I have to admit that I’m intrigued. Lurkers, any chance you’d be willing to give a shout-out? Even if you know me, ‘cmon, play. You can post under “anonymous,” that’s cool.

Tell me:

1) where you’re from
2) the title of one book that rocked your world when you were 16 (or, if you’re 16 or younger, what’s rocking you now)
3) one thing on your to-do list before you die.

I’ll start. I’m Danya. I’m from the Chicago area, but also kind of from San Franciso or LA (depending on what “from” means) but I’m in Jerusalem right now.
I still get all animated when I talk about The Stranger by Camus (or its corresponding song by The Cure.)
I would love to live in the country–someplace really rural. I never have, for any meaningful amount of time.

more bombs.

Just found out about attacks on several Sinai resorts, where there were a lot of Israelis vacationing over the Sukkot holiday.

A lot of people were killed.

.ברוך דין האמת

Huh

I just got my absentee ballot in the mail (finally!)

It seems that Leonard Peltier is running for President of the United States.
He is, in fact, on the ballot.

(I’m not voting for him; this race is too close for me to nader my vote away.)

Does anybody know anything about this?

Geektastic!

This morning some of my classmates and I went to visit a 1:50 scale model of Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period, made “with authentic construction materials.” It was dorkariffically dope, I do have to say.

Here’s a wide shot of one of the areas. You can see a person in the back, to get a sense of size/scale, etc. The three towers in the right hand corner are right next to Herod’s palace (which you can’t see so well in this one); what’s left of them today is called the Citadel of David. The thing on the back/leftish bit is the back of the Temple, but more on that in a moment.

The amount of detail they got was really cool:

Of course, they did a great job on the Temple. The steps that the Levites would walk up, singing, and the little portals to the mikvahot (ritual baths), everything.

We had a little audio tour that pointed out all sorts of fun factoids, but my camera batteries died pretty quickly after the tour started, so I didn’t get shots of some of the real nuggets.

Here’s another one of the Temple. Almost enough to make you want to start sacrificing live animals, isn’t it?

Another really cool thing was seeing the Kotel (Western Wall) in its original context and Robinson’s Arch.
They marked the Kotel with the red arrow. Robinson’s Arch is on the corner, with steps that lead up into the Temple. (coooool). Now it’s where Conservative (Masorti) Jews pray sometimes, since the main Kotel area has a mechitza separating men from women, and we are egalitarian folk.

The audio guide obviously also talked at length about the destruction of the Temple and subsequent exile, lots of the play-by-play of the Jewish revolt in 66 CE and the subsequent Roman smackdown. As such, over to the side they also had a couple of Roman weapons (catapault, etc) for us to see, and a few little guys to go with them.

Bad Roman! No kill Jews! No destroy pretty Temple!

Which is funny, ’cause there are no Jewish (or any other kind of) people in the Jerusalem model. Maybe it’s OK to make graven images of gentiles?

In any case, it was great to get a good injection of Brainy Smurf before school starts in earnest on Sunday (yeah, here the workday ends Thurz and starts again Sunday). It’ll be fun to learn Talmud now and be picturing this when the Rabbis of the Mishnah and Gemara hold forth on how it used to be back in the good old days, when men were men and cows were God’s dinner.

Why modern life amuses me sometimes

I am posting this while sitting in a sukkah.

The wireless world seems, now, to extend to little temporary religious huts that echo those in which the Israelites dwelled while wandering in the desert.

Would have made the pilgrimage-by-foot to Jerusalem easier back in the day if they could have stopped to check their email, eh?

for all you Mac geeks out there

this site has more exciting, random doodads (as well of plenty that are, well, just random) than you will be able to handle. I now have a moon on my desktop that waxes and wanes along with the real one, for example. And it’s right purty, too.

Thanks to Micah at St. Jerome’s Library for the tip.

Home Gravity.

That’s what my friend KS calls it. I’ve discovered over the years that whatever home I live in tends to exert a tremendous amount of gravity. I generally have trouble leaving my sofa, let alone leaving town.

When I’m with someone else, I’m a great traveller. Went to the Dead Sea right before Yom Kippur with my friend R.–lowest point on Earth, baby, at 1373 feet below sea level. We had a grand old time hiking these beyooootiful wadis with waterfalls

and taking dips in warm springs of clear, swimmable water, smearing the magical mineral-rich, toxin-absorbing Dead Sea mud all over our bodies (it was really more fun than useful, I think, but who doesn’t like to play with mud?) and bobbing around on top of the weird, oily, salty, salty (no-no-no-don’t-get-it-in-your-eyes-owwwww) water, which was about the consistiency of Jell-O after it’s logged about 30% of the time needed to chill in the fridge. I could have spent hours and hours just floating on the surface, staring at the psalms-old mountains

and letting my mind go blank. My current theory is that Dead Sea water is a lot like amniotic fluid.

Anyway, all this to say, when I’m with someone else, I’m rather capable of getting places on time and doing quite a bit in a new place. With the right travel partner I can cover a lot of rather quality ground in a relatively short amount of time. But when I’m on my own, my rather homey tendencies tend to slow me down a lot. Deep down, I’m not very adventurous. Even when I took off for my big SIX MONTHS OF TRAVEL DURING MY MID-TWENTIES (ooh, ahh) I didn’t go that many places. I’d spend a week hanging around a town I liked, just sort of bumming around, wandering around gardens, sitting in cafes. A week in Seville, a week in Marakkech, a week in Barcelona, a heck of a lot longer than that in Stockholm. Sure, I saw some art and other notable sites, but mostly I just made a few friends among the locals, created a little world for myself, and inhabited it. (It’s worth observing that all these cities–as well as many of the other ones I tend to get stuck in–have a hard-to-name character trait in common with San Francisco.) If I came to a place I didn’t like, I’d leave after a day or two and go try to find one that I did, and then I’d settle there comfortably for as long as the spirit kept me unmoved. Maybe my somewhat unambitious approach to seeing the world is a response to my dad’s style of travel, which happens at a breakneck speed as every worthy site in the guidebook gets checked off, one by one. It always made me crazy.

When I was in Israel last time (as part of my SIX MONTHS etc.) I found that my home gravity kept me pretty firmly entrenched in Jerusalem. I tried to leave! I did! But after a few days in Tiberias or Netanya or wherever, I’d find myself somehow, inexplicably, not on a bus to Egypt or the Golan as planned, but headed back to Jerusalem, again. Yeah, thanks, God. I don’t know how, but somehow it wound up that I’d be in Jerusalem for a week and then I’d leave for a few days, and then…. Home gravity. Bigtime.

I don’t know why I thought things would be different this time, here somewhere exciting and far away for a whole year. I always picture myself as some sort of swashbuckler, but: No. So when I blocked Friday-Tuesday of this week off for travel, I really did imagine that I’d manage to get from Sfat for Shabbat to hiking in the Golan and then several days at the discos of Tel Aviv before I came home, energized and ready to rumble.

Hah. Packed my bag for the above-described jetsetting, got to the bus station, and several things became clear that had only been fuzzy before, due to it being Sukkot and people being hard to reach that week: 1) The place I had arranged to stay in Sfat was adamant that they had no food there. And the woman at the inn was not very helpful on the question of whether anything would be open by the time I got there (in Israel, stores tend to close mid-afternoon for Shabbat). 2) the egalitarian synagogue was in fact NOT meeting that Shabbos, and no, nobody there did have a house I could go to for Shabbos dinner
3) Spending my Shabbos in Sfat, where the religion is, if anything, fiercer than Jerusalem’s, with possibly no food and davvening in a closet-sized space behind a brick wall (they really do love the ladies up thar in the Galilee) or just hiding in my hotel room the whole time sounded, you know, not like how I’d enjoy a break from the fundamentalist pressures of the town where I’d pay rent.

Keep in mind also that it’s about 10:30 as this is all happening. And that by the time I go back and forth to inquire about buses to Tiberias or Akko and the like, it’s already 11:15. ANd going someplace Adventurous that requires a 3-hour busride and having me checked in and settled in time for a 4:45ish Shabbos beginning (we changed the clocks, remember?) was seeming more and more ambitious. The kind of ambitious that I am, fundamentally, not.

So I called a friendly aquaintence in Tel Aviv. Got on the bus. Was at her apt. by 1:30 or so. Her roommates and she were going to have Shabbos dinner at their house anyway. Friend and I walked to Shenkin/Allenby–yes, more of what I already know, not so much with the new experiences–and she went to buy food while I walked around the super-fabulous twice-weekly street fair in which local artists set up tables with their super-cute mezzuzot, earrings, and whatnot. Then we walked home, made dinner. Shabbos day I walked to the beach, and then to a park. Would have gone dancing last night but the horrible hacking cough (yep, sick again–thank you Middle Eastern bacteria) kept me grounded. Spent this morning sitting at a cafe, reading the paper–a rare decadence. And then I was done. It was time to go back to Jerusalem. My five days of wild adventure turned into a couple of days hanging out in Tel Aviv. Classic Danya. By the book.

And now I’m back, comfortably on my couch, where they keep my Mac, among other things. I find that I have a renewed excitement/interest in spending the next couple of days seeing friends and more to the point, working on writing stuff. So I’m back to the place where I’m my most wild and crazy, if you can even call it that: inside an open Word doc.