Say Goodnight, Gracie

Notice: I know some people are going to be too lazy to read this all the way through. Long story short: this site is no longer active. But fear not. It is being combined with my other site to form a new site in an effort to consolidate and prettify stuff. This post is cross-posted both at the other site and at the new site.

Life's a funny thing, they say.

I started blogging in 2003, as a sophomore in college. It was at the encouragement of a few friends who found my goofy sense of humor funny, and were willing (even eager) to read humorous pieces I had written. And boy, were they goofy. Some of the most creative (and dare I say inspired?) stuff I've written came out of that period, actually. And much to my surprise, people started reading. Not the 'public,' whoever they are, but people I knew - my siblings, and other friends and family - people who I wasn't even writing for originally. They actually found me genuinely funny. It was weird. My siblings, both older, never seemed to really admire me for anything, and now, it seemed, I was impressing them, and their friends. It was very cool, a real ego boost. And time went on, and I continued updating, with the occasional 3-month dry spell. I never got to the point of posting regularly or particularly frequently, likely due in a large part to my commitment to producing original work, rather than linking to other people's creations. Well, that and procrastination....

Allow me to digress here for a minute. I was something of an oddity in the blogging world. Most bloggers maintain readership by posting often. Typically, either these posts involve descriptions of their day-to-day lives, something which one never really runs out of material for, or they'd post links to other creative work, occasionally with added commentary. I was not prepared to broadcast the details of my life to the general public, and I didn't want to exist remora-like, living off the scraps left by the real producers of writing, images, music, and video. I wanted to be one of those producers, by writing relatively impersonal, humorous pieces. And that's pretty hard to do regularly, or it was for me, anyhow. But I kept at it, because even though my number of daily hits rarely crept above 10, it also didn't really sink down to zero. People were reading, so I continued writing, albeit sometimes infrequently. About a year and a half after starting blogging, it occurred to me that I had what to write that wasn't goofy and humorous. The material I had in mind was downright serious. And so I had a problem. I couldn't just post those pieces on the original blog, like nothing was different, because I didn't want to turn away readers who had come to expect humor. But I still wanted to share my thoughts on weightier matters than the odd contents of my fridge.

So I started a second blog, this site.

This just compounded my problems. Ideally, I would have a regularly updated blog, with many readers and an active and lively comments section. By creating a second blog, for my 'serious' stuff, I was splitting my efforts and my readership, and ultimately hurting my progress in reaching my goals. But what could I do? I kept updating both blogs, and people (still very few) read both. I wanted to upgrade. But how? Well, for starters, if I was going to maintain two blogs, when one could probably suffice, I could at least make them both stand out. Thus began the big redesign. After a few false starts, I redesigned each blog in turn, from the bottom up. The functionality remained the same, but they got all dressed up in what I thought were nice makeovers. Still, while I wasn't getting at the main issue, I ran into others. Blogger wasn't giving me the flexibility and control I wanted to have with my site, nor did I have online storage to use. Plus, the web addresses were long and cumbersome - there were regular readers who sometimes forgot them. So I decided on a new non-solution, something I'd been planning on doing anyway. Enter the as-yet-unused bitsofink.com. I thought it was a neat little title which happened to be available - using a play on the word "bits" to connote digital writing, and a kind of meshing of the past and present, something I try to aim for in my writing. (Ok, so I guess that sounds a little pretentious. Mea culpa.) So then the question was "now what?" Well, I could (and did, actually) import the two blogs into one, hosted at bitsofink. But this wasn't a solution either - not yet, anyway. People would need to be redirected to the new site (actually, not such a difficult problem to solve), plus, what would become of the new designs? They centered around their banners, and the new combo-blog would be called something different. So if I wanted a new site, I'd need a new design. I got as far as designing the banner, which I just dropped into a (fairly boring) pre-made template. But I continued updating the two Blogger sites, and nothing really changed.

Finally, the final straw came. You see, as I continued writing in the 'serious' blog, I found that I was writing more and more personal material. And life has a way of not being easily placed into 'humorous' or 'serious' boxes. Life just is, and we just live it - lovely and crazy and giddy and depressing as it is. It's sometimes so terrifying you have to laugh, and sometimes so laughable you have to cry, and sometimes, it's just wabi-sabi. So I was coming up with posts that didn't belong in one of the two blogs, but somewhere in-between. So I decided I'd just have to bite the bullet and do it. So I worked on a redesign that I think is nice enough to justify the move and the abandonment of the old sites. I've imported all of the old posts and even marked them with which blog they originally came from (using fun little icons. I still have a few things to tweak, and I need to clean up the old imported posts so they look right and such, but things are more or less up and running. Now I can get back to posting in earnest, and maybe even persuade some of the other bloggers who read my stuff to throw a link or two my way (hint, hint) to help me finally get this operation off the ground. The old sites will remain up, and I'll put up a notice to that effect within a week, but all new updates will be at the new site.

Phew, who knew blogging could be such hard work?

Yelling With You?

A story today - one of the best illustrations of typical Israeli behavior that I've ever heard. A friend of mine made aliyah with her family when she was 10. She had 3 sisters (one older, two younger) and their father stayed back in the U.S. to finish up some business stuff, intending to join his wife and 4 children as soon as he could. Their first apartment was 7 floors up, in an otherwise empty building that (as luck would have it) had the electricity and water turned off. (Let me emphasize for any readers out there who are not familiar with Israel: Israel has a first-world infrastructure. This was an oddity.) The mother of the family called and tried to get the city to turn on their utilities, as they were supposed to, but despite promises she received, nothing changed. This, in addition to dealing with everything a new immigrant has to deal with, on top of having 4 children under the age of 13 in a country fairly foreign to them, with her husband over 6000 miles away, was more than a little stressful.

So one day, she was driving the car they had rented for the first couple of weeks, and she accidentally turned the wrong way onto a one-way street. It happens to the best of us, especially when we're stressed and preoccupied. She encountered another car driving the correct way, who responded in typical Israeli fashion by honking his horn vigorously, to alert the poor woman that she was wrong and he was right, and she should therefore get the heck out of his way. He soon escalated. He got out of his car, walked over to hers, and started yelling at her, a far more effective way of informing her in no uncertain terms that she was driving the wrong way and what the heck was wrong with her and was she an idiot and so on and so on. It was too much. She got out of the car and started yelling back, letting all of her troubles out, emphasizing that she wasn't an idiot, she just had no power, no water, 4 daughters underfoot, an absentee husband, and she was a new immigrant. The other driver still worked up, just got angrier, but this time on her behalf. "You have no power, and no water? That's just unacceptable!" He promptly marched down to the city offices with her and yelled at enough people till they turned on her power and water.

That's Israelis. They'll yell at you about the small things, and yell for you about the big things.

Dreaming for a Day

So I wrote about Yom HaZikaron and put off writing about Yom HaAtzma'ut (Israeli Independence Day) for almost two weeks. But I really should write about this one. Here goes.

I was walking back home from Yom HaAtzma'ut festivities with a (new) friend at 3 in the morning. Like all Jewish holidays, it started in the evening and would continue until the next evening. I had spent all night in town and I was exhausted but elated. It had been a good night. She, who'd made aliyah several years ago, turned to me and asked, "So what do you think of your first Yom HaAtzma'ut as an oleh?"

I was too jumbled to answer properly. "Ask me again in a few days," I replied.

But she pressed me. "Come on, what's your first impression?"

"Ummm...." I hesitated for a moment and thought back on the evening's events. I thought back to Yom HaZikaron, and how it worked as a lead-in. The siren sounded, and the country became one organism and that organism held its breath for a minute. And this? Well, in some ways, this was the opposite. Lots of noise - people singing, dancing, teenage hooligans crowding the streets and having shaving-cream fights. And the following day? I knew what was coming: barbecues, hikes, and family time. Religious Zionists said a special set of prayers, as the day has both religious and nationalist significance. And most Jews - religious or not - were joining in the festivities in one way or another. Myself, I prayed the evening prayers with Bnei Akiva, the Zionist youth organization that had some influence on my decision to move here. It was really nice. It was right and good and appropriate. Afterwards, they showed us a video, a typical "Israel is great, look at all of our accomplishments" presentation. I found it odd, and I got the sense that those around me just weren't that interested in it either. Because this all seemed very after-the-fact, very much preaching to the choir. We were there already, living in the Land of Israel, contributing to the State of Israel in one way or another. We didn't need to be told how great Israel is. And in any case, if we wanted to see something to be impressed by, we could just walk outside, and marvel at everything around us that wasn't here 60 years ago, and how it's connected to everything that was here 2000 years ago.

Normally, while watching these presentations, I kind of get a little uncomfortable. Because when you get right down to it, they're propaganda. They do more than put Israel in a positive light. They don't mention all the problems we have here and therefore (1) give people a distorted image of Israel (as distortion in the positive direction is still distortion) and (2) prevent people from grappling with the issues more with the aim of resolving them.

But amid everything I was feeling, that uneasiness wasn't there this time. I thought maybe that we could lie to ourselves just a little bit, just that day. For a moment, I focused on the positives and only the positives. For a moment, the problems - and boy, do we have problems - faded into the background.

For a moment, Israel was perfect.

I think that that moment extended for the rest of the day. I saw a friend later who I had corresponding with about political issues. It was her turn to respond. When she saw me in person, she said, "I haven't forgotten you. I'm still thinking of what to respond."

"It's ok. I don't want to talk about politics tonight anyway," I replied, and as I said it, I realized just how true that was.

Then I saw rikudei am. It means "folk dancing," and the closest thing we have to it in the U.S. is square dancing. But in the areas I come from, at least, it's unpracticed and obscure. But in Israel, it's more a part of the fabric of life. And so I found myself in Kikar Safra (Safra square, a large plaza near a bunch of the government buildings in Jerusalem) watching hundreds of people dance in synch. Most people seemed to just know the steps - at least well enough to fake it. It was surreal, like I had just walked into the middle of a musical. But the Israelis didn't find it the least bit odd. Yes, they realized it was campy and quaint, but no one was bothered by the campiness. Rather, they reveled in it. For a moment, I could see in that group of dancers the children and grandchildren of the chalutzim, the pioneers, who hold a legendary status in Israeli cultural memory, as the original kibbutznikim, who proudly worked the land by day, spoke of a glorious future at night, and joyously danced the hora somewhere in-between. Oh, they had problems themselves aplenty, and in our day, we see some of their legacy in that regard as well. But not the night of Yom HaAtzma'ut. That night, I just saw the legends. And somehow, that felt right.

I turned to my friend to answer, and these thoughts came pouring out much more articulately than I had formulated them in my head. It was something like this:

"I think it's a day of escapism. Normally, escapism is bad. It prevents us from dealing with the reality as it is, and excuses us from responsibilities we should be facing. But for one day, it's inspiring. For one day, we let each person see Israel as an ideal, whatever that may be for that individual. For one day, we let people believe that Israel is as it should be, to remind them what it could be."

And for me, that's as it should be.

600,000 Flowers

So here we are again, on the eve of another Yom HaZikaron, (Israeli Memorial Day), only this time it's different. At least, for me, it's different.

Last time, it was the Other People we were mourning - people from stories, people from history. Even when I was living in a Yeshivat Hesder, where many of my peers were soldiers on active duty, even (and I truly hate to admit it) when those I knew were affected or even killed, I still had a level of detachment. I see that now, because I can feel that falling away. Now these people don't just include my friends or family. They're also the neighbors downstairs whose kids make so much noise, the barber who cuts my hair, the strangers I exchange glances with on the bus.

And now, I look at the soldiers still protecting us, mourning their fallen comrades, and realize I could be one of them. Because I recently received a tzav rishon, the first step in the army draft process. Now, I know that at 24 years old (having moved here at 23), I won't be assigned anything resembling a standard tour of duty, and I might not end up getting drafted at all. But I'm on the list, and when I saw that letter, it affected me more deeply than I'd expected. I mean, I knew it was coming, but like a lot of things in my life lately, seeing it out-there-in-the-world caught me by surprise. There it was. The Israeli army, talking to me, asking me whether I should join them. Israelis are 'us' now, not 'them.'

This morning, I opened the newspaper and saw two stories plastered across the front page: "Israel Remembers the Fallen, page 2," and "Kassam Rocket hits House in Sderot, page 3." One can't help but be struck by the odd juxtaposition. We are remembering those fallen in the past even as we tearfully add the recently killed to the list. I've heard it said once that Israel's problem is that it remembers too much. Past injustices and hatreds and problems don't go away, because we're always caught up in what happened, never able to put it behind us. That may be so - I don't know - but I wonder if we really have a choice. We aren't just remembering the past; the past is constantly protruding uninvited into the present. We're putting flowers on the graves of the fallen, while missiles crash into our houses.

And the flowers. 600,000 of them are being laid on graves tomorrow, according to the newspaper. 600,000. A significant number: the population of battle-ready Jewish males that left Egypt for the Land of Israel, and roughly the population of Jews in the very same Land of Israel in 1947, right before the creation of the state. In Ancient Egypt, there was an enemy with an irrational hatred of us, who subjected us to inhuman suffering just because. And we left, the 600,000 men taking their families with them. 3000+ years later, 600,000 Jews faced a similarly implacable enemy. And now, we put 600,000 flowers on 22,305 graves, get up, and continue fighting the same war we've been fighting for 60 years, the same war we've been fighting for 3000 years, ever since we were forged into a nation in the iron furnace of Egypt.

Put the past behind us? Some days I wish we could. I really do. But it's simply not possible.

The question here, the real important question, is what do we do on Yom HaZikaron? Because I think this says a lot about us - how we remember, how we mourn. Rather than succumb to the bitterness that, arguably, we have a right to, we hold our ceremonies, and we tell our stories. We honor our fallen and commit ourselves to pursue the values they died fighting for. And we sound a siren, and for a full minute, everything else stops. Everything listens to the siren wailing for potential lost, families torn asunder, and rivers of tears shed. The same siren is sounded on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, but the two couldn't be more different. True, both are for Jews killed by their enemies, and both are a way of remembering and honoring the departed. But while the deaths in the Holocaust stand silently in defiance of explanation, dragging reason kicking and screaming from the room, the deaths in Israels wars are a result of people fighting for Israel. They're a result of people living lives of meaning, lives of purpose, lives of dedication to something greater than themselves. And when you look at it that way, it's a bit easier to staunch the flow of bitterness. When you look at it that way, it makes a lot more sense that at the moment that Yom HaZikaron ends, Yom HaAtzma'ut (Israeli Independence Day) begins. We're not just fighting the wars of the past; we're also living the dream of the past. The two are linked.

Last night, I heard in great detail, the story of Roi Singer, a doctor who was among the first miliumnikim (reservists) sent into Lebanon last summer. As he told his story, I tried to imagine myself in his shoes, performing surgery under fire, or as one of the soldiers he was treating. It was a weird feeling, to say the least. Yes, I know: I likely won't see active combat any time soon. But there's still that letter from the army sitting on my desk. I still have a doctor's appointment on Wednesday to see if I'm fit for combat. And I'm still going to the enlistment office in a week or so, as ordered by the government. No matter how this turns out in my particular case, that little letter was an important one to me. Here's the government saying, in its own bureaucratic way, "like it or not, you're part of our story now, not just a spectator. You can't stand on the sidelines anymore; we have more than enough people there. It's time to be an active participant." I just hope I'm up to the task.

Breaking Design Rules

I've been getting into web design more and more these days. I mean, in-between moving into a new apartment, the various random holidays around now, working 8-5. You know. Web design is really interesting in that it blends graphic design and programming and demands quite a lot of the designer (or team of designers) and presents some really interesting challenges (e.g. architects never have to worry that different users of their building will see different things based on the configuration of their eyes...) I'll spare you further elaboration.

As he tends to, Jason Kottke linked to a really interesting website, which, as he notes,

breaks pretty much every rule that contemporary web designers have for effective site design. The site is a linear progression of images, essentially 30 splash pages one right after another. It doesn't have any navigation except for forward/back buttons; you can't just jump to whatever page you want. July barely mentions anything about the book and only then near the end of the 30 pages. There's no text...it's all images, which means that the site will be all but invisible to search engines. No web designer worth her salt would ever recommend building a site like this to a client.

And he's completely right. Believe me, I've read enough web designers' writings (and boy do they looove writing about it) to know that they would turn up their noses at the idea of this. Yet I wonder if they would when confronted with it face-to-face. Because the site works, Kottke continues,

because the story pulls you along so well....The No One Belongs Here More Than You site is a lesson for web designers: the point is not to make sites that follow all the rules but to make sites that will best accomplish the primary objectives of the site. (emphasis added)

Which is a terribly good point. I've drunk the Kool-Aid of the web design community; they have mantras that they repeat and follow, not blindly, but with an implicit understanding that they are not to be violated without a really compelling reason. And sometimes, when you do that, you miss the point.

Apart At The Seams

I moved here to Israel two weeks after the Second Lebanon War ended, when the bitter taste of it still lingered. As the nation now prepares (or braces itself) for Lebanon War #3, people are looking back to last year and what happened then. I recently stumbled across this article (via Good Neighbors) and it threw me for a loop:

Together, Helen and I had tried to create a tidy little universe with a population of two. In this universe, it didn’t matter that I was a Jew and Helen was an Arab. We were beyond the politics....

Politics slumbered alongside us. Sometimes it spoke in its sleep, sometimes it rolled over, but it did not wake up.

And then, the war.

When the morning newscast announced that two Israeli soldiers had been kidnapped along the border of Lebanon, I felt the dream world that Helen and I had constructed around ourselves begin to evaporate....

As the war raged on, our morning ritual of listening to the news on NPR became agonizing. Helen still hadn’t heard from her aunts and uncles and cousins, and she feared the worst. I switched my alarm clock from “radio” to “buzzer.”

One morning, about a week after the conflict had begun, the tension was especially palpable. All of a sudden, Helen threw down her boots in frustration. Her fingers balled into fists.
“We have to talk,” she said.
“I know,” I replied.
“You are so distant,” she said. Helpless and angry, she stared out the window.
I picked up Helen’s boots and brought them to her.
“I don’t even know what to say,” was the best I could do. I was afraid that if we talked, we would discover that we just could not be together. I was afraid of discovering that love had failed to elevate us to a place beyond politics. “Please,” I begged, “give me some time.”

....I was terrified. Terrified that someone from Helen’s family could get killed by an Israeli bomb. Terrified that every time I saw her Caller ID, I thought it would be our last conversation. I kept imagining her carefully chosen words, her contrite tone as she whispered through the tears, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this anymore.”

My friends were supportive, and a few admitted to being inspired by us, framing our relationship in hopeful, hyperbolic terms, a microcosm of the peace process itself. When I expressed my own doubts, one overzealous friend scolded me, “You can’t give up! You owe it to humanity to make this work.”

As if I didn’t have enough on my mind. Now world peace hinged on my ability to find common ground with my girlfriend.

And so on. They go through some really rocky times, and the emotion is real and needs no hyperbole to validate itself. (Read the article itself to see how it turns out.) My issues with intermarriage and interreligious couples aside, it was touching.

In any case, after reading it, a memory bubbled up from the depths of my head - something I've hardly thought about in 3 years, even though at the time, it seemed like one of those moments, the ones you remember in a very real way. Back when I was in college, during my sophomore year, I was hanging out in my room in the CJL, the Jewish living house on campus. My door was open, and I heard (or maybe saw) a girl about my age wandering around cautiously. She clearly was looking for something and was not familiar with or particularly comfortable in our house. Being the friendly guy I was (am?), I walked out of my room to help her out. She her name was Tori (I think) and she was looking for the Hillel and I explained (as we often did) that we were not the Hillel, but I could show her where to find it. She dismissed my offer wearily, too emotionally drained to go wandering around another unfamiliar building. I invited her to sit down, she collapsed on the couch and started breaking down in tears.

The story came out: she was Jewish and going out with an Arab guy, I think a Palestinian. At some point, The Conflict came up. One of his friends said something negative about Jews, and she protested. Her boyfriend said "your people are f-ing unpleasant." She was floored. She hadn't expected this at all. From what she said, it seemed like that, and the brief fallout afterwards, were the last words they'd exchanged. He and his friend called several times during our conversation, but she hung up on them each and every time. There was no bridge-building here. It wasn't even a consideration.

Back to her sitting on the couch, crying. Here I have a girl crying because politics and bigotry reared their ugly heads in this place she thought was safe. Tori felt so helpless, she told me, since she didn't know much about The Conflict and couldn't argue with them. I started to explain the issues and complexities of the whole messy situation in Israel, but it was clear (or at least, it's clear to me now) that she didn't need a history lesson. She needed a friend. She didn't need someone to solve this; there was no solution. She needed someone to listen. And I did somewhat, and I hope it was sufficient. She left, with nothing resolved, nothing accomplished, and I couldn't help but wonder if I had just missed an opportunity. But for what, exactly?

This story has a postscript. I emailed her shortly after her visit, offerring to help if I could. She didn't reply in any meaningful way, and I didn't hear from her again. Months later, I was leading a seder (among many others) at school, and who should show up at my table, but Tori. But not weeping, uncertain Tori. This was dressed-up, confident, sorority-girl Tori. And since I hadn't met this version of her, she acted the part. There was a flicker of recognition, a brief nod, when I started pointing out that we'd met before, but then it was gone. We went through the whole seder and throughout, no one but us could've guessed that here was a girl who'd broken down crying and poured her heart out to me. I was like her psychologist; I had seen her at her most emotionally vulnerable. We'd been strangers from the moment she'd walked out of my room that day.

Ta-da!

I'm trying to figure out if the triumph I felt upon successfully fixing a difficult paper jam in the printers warrants the emotions that came with it. I stood up, and wanted to raise my arms and yell "Ta-da!" It reminded me of this entry from An Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life:

Children get to say ta-da!, and I guess magicians, but other than that, it's an underutilized expression. I'm trying to think—an adult might say it as she waltzes in with the turkey, or a homemade cake. But a self-congratulatory ta-da! would certainly be warranted for any number of daily accomplishments. I cleaned out the trunk of my car. Ta-da! I finished filling out the insurance application. Ta-da! I made the bed. Ta-da!

I agree. I think we should be allowed and encouraged to exclaim and proclaim our triumphs. Even little ones.

All The Cool Kids

(Yes, still putting off part 3. So sue me.)

I was thinking today about trends and fashions. No matter how radical or off-the-beaten path a cultural group is, they'll all tend to do things a certain way, just because a few of them started doing it that way. I wonder what it is about us that makes us flock so readily.

Heck, I bet the even the Amish churn butter a certain way, 'cause that's how all the cool kids were churning.