Move Over, Chumus and Techina: It's Facebook and Blog!

Just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I'm finding it tougher to crank out blog posts when it's so much more immediate and easy to post a one-liner on Facebook (or Twitter). Yeah, that hasn't changed. Anyway, I thought I'd post some of my recent status updates here to spark some conversation, sorted by topic, along with some editor's notes...

Madonna
Guess who's come to Israel? Yes, it's a big deal just as Paul McCartney was 2 years ago and (fill in the blank....Leonard Cohen?) will be later. We just don't get every artist in the world coming every other day like in the States so it makes for a lot of hype and excitement. It's actually because I still regret missing Paul that I decided to buy a ticket to this show. I'm sure it will be worth it....especially if the rumors are true about Mr. Timberlake showing up. Here's an article from journalist and pal David Brinn about the resurgent concert scene over this last year.

#37 on this week's wish list: For Justin to get Shimon Peres to say, "Ehhh...I'm breenging sexy beck."
This is not impossible. I got him to say "What is Cheetah?"

If we told him this was Whitney Houston, would he even know the difference?

If Justin shows up and performs "D*** in a Box", I'll buy everyone in the park a Goldstar.
Not likely unless Andy Samberg is also into the Kabbalah.

Which one of these characters is rumored to be making a surprise appearance with Madonna this week?
1) Justin Timberlake
2) Sheikh Yassin
3) Moshe Oofnik
You can only choose one.

40 meals at Melech Falafel or ticket Wednesday night to Madonna. I have chosen.
Not such a hard choice. It's not like 40 falafels would have lasted much more than a week anyway.

Jerusalem and Tel Aviv
It's still summertime and it's been hot. At least in Tel Aviv. At the Jerusalem Beer Festival, I was literally shaking from being chilly at which point someone suggested that I might in fact be a woman. I have nothing to say about that (except that I just broke a nail.)

Gotta give credit where credit is due: Jerusalem, you really stepped it up with the Beer Festival tonight. Your move, Tel Aviv.
Good time. Then again, it's not so hard to create a fun event when there's alcohol flowing. (See "Ball, Matzah")

More humid: NYC or Tel Aviv? Discuss. Now if you'll please excuse me, I'll be wringing out my shorts.
Yeeeeeeeeeah. How many showers on a weekend day is too many? The Kinneret drying up aside, three is completely reasonable. Has anyone ever hit four? Do I hear four?

A rough estimate of how much the average person sweats during a Tel Aviv summer.

If chumus and cafe barad wrestled to the death, who would win?
Inconclusive. I think barad got more votes.

Forget Jaanglo, Flathunting, etc...there has got to be a website/better way for subletters and sublettees to come together. I have seen 45,000 FB status updates of people looking for a room in J'lem/TA over the holidays and people looking to fill their room. Problem is remembering who they are later/matching them up.
This might deserve its own post.

Michael Jackson
At Cafe Cafe in Ramat Aviv killing time before meeting. They're playing back to back MJ songs. See, it's not just me.

Do you know that "Thriller" was written by Rod Temperton? WHO THE *&^% IS ROD TEMPERTON??? I'd have guessed Quincy Jones.

Aroma is playing "The Lady in My Life", the final song off "Thriller". That would be less interesting if it didn't immediately follow Boyz II Men and Richard Marx.
This was in New York where I drank cafe hafuch at the UWS Aroma four straight days. In other news, my blood may have turned brown.

Why the long face, Richard? It's 2009 and you're getting attention!

Shopping/Errands
Proud to announce most significant purchase in my 3 years in Israel. Is it...
1) Car?
2) House?
3) Chumus possessing superpowers?
4) Hebrew letter stickers for keyboard?
Let the guessing commence.
If you said 4...היית נכון! It was fun putting the stickers on, except when I dropped a semi-colon on the floor and almost had a hetkef lev when I couldn't find it. ("Dropped a semi-colon" totally sounds like a euphemism for something inappropriate...not sure what exactly.)

I have a new Ipod touch. In other news, I don't expect to focus for the rest of my life.

Phone broke. Bought new one. Figured out how to download Mac plug-in and transfer contacts with Bluetooth. Ate a shawarma. It's not easy being this glamourous. (If I didn't have your #, a year or so ago, I probably am missing it now.)
So at the Orange store, the guy is asking me what I'll be using the phone for so he can help me choose one. "Will you be micro-blogging?" I'm looking at the menu options: Entertainment, TV, Movies....what is this, Best Buy?!? I JUST WANT TO CALL PEOPLE, DAMMIT!

Is anyone on the planet still just making calls?!? I could live till I'm 145, I do not plan on listening to the radio on my cell phone (and certainly not aloud from the back of a bus like those punk teenagers. Yes, I'm aware that I just sounded 843.)

And enough with all the 3G talk. "My phone is 3G! Is it 3G? It uses 3G!" Guess what. Nobody knows what 3G means, including 94.5% of the people saying it. My phone is 4G. So shut up and leave me alone.

I just Googled "4G" and this image came up. Looks like a phone to me.
I'm never upgrading again.

Wait, so when you turn your phone on and the screen goes white, does that mean it's going to be a good day?

If you just picked up a box of tampons thinking it was soap, you might be an immigrant. Maybe I shouldn't have admitted this one.

Miscellaneous
I'm sure I could find a link between these if I felt like it.

Article from the Sacramento paper about Omri Caspi, first Israeli to make the NBA. I wonder if he'd trade courtside seats for a spot in my chumus club.
I'm afraid to look at the talkbacks. An article about an Israeli basketball player...just the right environment for crazy nutjobs! Not to be confused with this nutjob.

New Dan Brown ("DaVinci Code") book finally coming out soon...surprised people aren't talking about this.
The only thing we know for sure is that it will be a movie 3 years from now and Tom Hanks will get to break out that nasty haircut again.

Remember the days when TVs required fewer than 479 remotes? On another note, I will pay someone a million dollars to come turn mine on.

Anybody else getting the FB ad on the right about dating Russian and Ukrainian women? I think they have the wrong guy.

Burned roof of mouth on Big Apple Pizza, now wondering how to drink coffee this morning. Any suggestions? Life in Israel really is hard.

Omig-d, is anyone watching "The Today Show"? They're teaching us how to eat healthy when traveling. Did I just see "Taco Bell"?
This one was from the States. Wish I were making it up.

We all caught up now? Time to go update my status...

Apparently "Supersize Me" Never Made It to the Middle East

Hello, my loyal readers-hope you all had a nice Shabbat. So I recently stopped by McDonald's at Ben-Gurion Airport which never ceases to be interesting. I know I've been here three years but I still can't help but notice differences between the Israeli employees and their counterparts in America. I wouldn't say it's the right-off-the-boat "omig-d, they're JEWISH!!!" thinking but it's somewhere in the neighborhood. Of course, within 2.3 seconds, those thoughts are dashed with "JESUS CHRIST, THIS MEAL IS LIKE TEN DOLLARS!" And on an unrelated note, when you're at a Shabbat dinner with all Orthodox people and you grab a burning hot dish of casserole with your bare hands, is it not appropriate to yell "JESUS CHRIST!"? Just curious. Not because I did it or anything.

As I recently wrote, I do make somewhat of an effort to be health-conscious here. (What does that even mean? If someone eats 457 shawarmas a day but he thinks about it, is he health-conscious? And if I told my roommates that I was cleaning-conscious, do you think they'd fall for it?)

Thankfully I don't eat that much shawarma and I do actually try to eat ok...at times. Not that this particular claim proves the point but I can't tell you the last time I supersized a meal at McDonald's. If I did, and I happened to be at the airport location, I'm not sure I'd even know how.

Do you see "supersize" on this menu anywhere? Oh wait....what the heck is that???

"Enlarging fries or potato wedges and drink in a meal to regular/large"???
You're kidding, right?

What does the cashier hit on the cash register? Do they fit that whole thing on one button? Is that the reason they don't have drive-thrus here, because it's too much work to ask, "Would you like to enlarge the fries or potato wedges and drink in a meal to regular/large?"

I think I'm finally starting to figure out this country.

I Guess We're a Bit Cynical About Politics in This Country

Yeah, so it's been two months since Michael Jackson died and I'm still listening to some combinatzia of "Off the Wall", "Thriller", "Bad", and Jackson 5 stuff roughly 487 times a day. As opposed to before when I listened to "Thriller" periodically over a span of fifteen years or so. But hey, can you blame me? When Michal Jackson comes to Nachalat Binyamin, it's a pretty big deal.

Yeah, I know I linked this just a couple of weeks ago. It's called a rerun.
Like on "Lost." Everybody loves "Lost."

(I'm also obsessive with whatever's in my music rotation for some reason. Apologies to whoever was around me in the summer of 2005 when I played "Mr. Brightside" 10-15 times a day, every day.)

Anyway, so a few days ago, I'm hanging out my friend Amalia, Tel Aviv superstar and co-member of Israel's premier chumus club. As I put on "Bad", she walks in and says...

Amalia: What is this, "Thriller"?

Benji: No, "Bad."

A: Same difference.

B: What?! Yeah, sure...Peres, Netanyahu, Sharon, it's all the same thing.

A: Nachon, oto chara! (Right, same s***!)

That wouldn't have been so funny if she then hadn't proceeded to start a conversation with her roommate about whether or not they are in fact the same thing. I suspect that they're actually more similar than Michael Jackson between 1982 and 1987. Not for me to decide.

Israeli Food: It's Not Weird as Hell (Contest!)

I love Israeli food. LOVE IT. It's healthy, it's delicious, and have I mentioned the vegetables? Holy falafel balls, I ate SO MUCH GOOD CRAP my last few weeks in the States and finished every other meal with some combination of regret ("What have I done???") and hangover ("Whooooooooooaaaaaaaa (hand on stomach).....I am NEVER doing that again.")

I went to Fuddruckers for lunch one day and tried to be healthy by ordering the bison burger. Unfortunately my efforts were thwarted by the cashier who casually asked me if I wanted to add mushrooms, bacon, cheese, a pinecone, and broken glass. Without even processing the question and the consequences of saying yes, I said yes. Between the burger, fries, and beverage in a glass the size of my first Tel Aviv apartment, I entered what some might call a food coma (really more of a food getting-hit-by-a-car.) If you had opened my heart and digestive system, you probably would have seen something resembling New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The next time missiles fall down on Sderot (חס וחלילה, G-d forbid), the IDF should go into Gaza and make them eat the one-pound burger at Fuddruckers. Of course then the world outcry would be warranted.

Anyway, while I loved eating back-to-back bags of real Doritos at the airport and unbelievable Tex-Mex in Austin, my body is glad to be back in a place where I don't need as much self-discipline to eat a vegetable (just one!) or be at least a little healthy.

And seriously, there's some weird stuff over there. I'm not saying the Jerusalem Mix isn't nasty (couldn't find a link, anybody want to explain?) but at least we KNOW what's in that. WHAT IN G-D'S NAME IS THIS???

Heinz, you were doing JUST fine with the ketchup.
Whose brilliant marketing idea was this?

Caption contest, let's go. Best caption to that picture gets a cup of coffee.

Spotted Dick Sponge Pudding? This is eaaaaaaaaaasy.

Baseball: Why I Created the "Israelis Make Me Laugh" Category

No idea what's with the crazy spacing here....I think Blogger is haunted (as if I needed any more reasons to move to Wordpress...)

My first post back in Israel.  To be honest, I've had a tough time sitting down and forcing myself to write.  Anybody know the feeling?  It can't be writers' block, there's never a shortage of stuff to talk about.  Some say the art of writing is dying because of the short, informal and often amateur writing style of blogs (I just sounded like Huey Lewis to myself..."they say the heart of...."  Never mind.)  

I'd go one step further...with the easy to write statuses on Twitter and Facebook and the immediate feedback of comments, it's hard to find motivation to crank something longer out.  For 2.5 years, I never made the gratuitous FB status update unless I needed something.  Two weeks ago, I decided to start just for the heck of it to see what kind of responses I could inspire in....whatever FB's equivalent to Twitter's 140 characters or less is.  I must say, not a bad way to waste tons of time.  Not bad at all.  If I get to uploading pictures, I'm in big trouble.

More or less...

But there is never a shortage of stuff to write about, even if it's from a few weeks back.  Even though I spent the summer in America, I did manage to hang out with some Israelis at summer camp, including my friend Assaf.  One night, on the oh-so-rare occasion that I managed to leave camp, the two of us celebrated my night off at the local watering hole.  I found my eyes glued to the game on TV and decided to take on the fun task of teaching Assaf the rules of baseball.

Have you ever actually tried to do this before?  Wow, not so easy.  What a seriously intricate set of rules...

"Ok, so the guy fields the ball and throws to first except sometimes he throws to second to force out that guy but if there's not a guy on first, the guy on second doesn't HAVE to run and please don't even ask me to explain the infield-fly rule."  

This brilliant observation made me gasp for air, laughing:

(put on your heaviest Israeli accent first)

"Ehh....waht eez weeth all deh speeting?  Dey ahr like leezehrds!"

Yep, he's right.

After a great play, I scream, "That was *&*$# unbeLIEVable!"

"Een Eenglish, I theenk you hev to curse to make sahm-theeng eem-portent."

Yep, he's right about that too.

"Ok, if you hit a ball foul, it's a strike UNLESS there are already two strikes in which case it doesn't mean anything."

"Waht???  Waht other stoopeed rules do you hev?  Eef eet eez Mahnday end one shooelace eez untied, you ken noht eet pizza???"

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  And by the way, he's totally right.

Soon after, the non-Jewish EMT of camp approaches and says in his heaviest Texas accent, "So are you ready to play shortstop for the Yankees?"

"Mahn, I do noht even know waht you jahst sed."

"The Yankees, the team from New York."

"Deednt they fight deh South in deh Civil War?"

For any of you non-Americans out there who may not be familiar with our national pasttime, this should teach you everything you need to know.  

By the way, if there's a funnier thirty minutes in any movie EVER, I've never seen it.  10 or so years ago, I remember thinking I couldn't imagine dating anyone who didn't think "Seinfeld" was funny.  I'm no longer that much of an extremist but in that same vein, I don't know how I could respect anyone who didn't find this funny. Dudes anyway.

PLAY BAAAAAAAAAALL!!!

Holy Crap, You Start a Blog and Next Thing You Know, You've Been Living in Israel for 3 Years

Anybody know where they were three years ago this moment? I do-on a chartered Nefesh B'Nefesh flight from JFK Airport to Ben-Gurion, not really knowing what was in store for me. And if you had asked me on August 9th, 2006 where I saw myself in three years, I don't know what I'd say. I certainly wouldn't have guessed Aroma on the Upper West Side sporting a shaved head and blue jeans despite the oppressive humidity. (NOT BALD! Shaved.) I would have expected and hoped to celebrate three years, that milestone after which your NBN financial assistance vests, IN Israel but does aliyah really ever unfold as an immigrant expects?

After six weeks at summer camp and three weeks traveling around the country seeing friends, I have answered the same questions countless times: "So how is it? Are you going to stay forever? Are you and Esti Ginzburg really a hot item?" Unfortunately I haven't been in Israel for 2 months which makes the questions hard to answer from anything but rote memory. That is, I can recite to you how Israel has been this last year but I'm not actually connected to the answer as I'm describing a physical and emotional place that I'm no longer in.

So instead of an "aliyaversary" celebratory post looking back at three years, you'll just have to bear with me for a few more days till I get home. Believe me, I'm looking forward to a return to our regularly scheduled program as much as you are. Until then, here's a reminder as to why I moved in the first place and a few words from the plane ride over.

To all of you who have read and/or commented over the last 3 years, thanks for giving me reason to keep writing. This blog has brought me a lot of pleasure, pushed me to be creative, has opened a lot of doors, allowed me to meet a lot of great people, and has been fun as hell to write. And of course, has given me a new level of appreciation for Israeli t-shirts. I've spent much of the last few weeks listening to "Off the Wall" and "Thriller", watching Youtube clips, and putting the man's life into perspective. As evidenced by the graphic below, much of the Middle East is doing the same. So let's all share a moment of silence for the King of Pop himself who apparently is Israeli....MICHAL JACKSON (מיכל‎)!

I'm fairly certain that I've seen at least three of these people at Shuk HaCarmel.

Thanks, Margo!

It's Almost Tu B'av....Now Where the Hell are My Heels?

Love is in the air, can you feel it? It's almost Tu B'av, the "Israeli Valentine's Day", as some would call it. Here's my favorite holiday video from me and the talented Molly Livingstone of Giving Tree Productions and The Big Felafel.

Here's something I didn't know....the French woman at the end? We actually worked at the same company at the time of filming. Is it a small world or what?

Chag sameach and enjoy!

The next Wreckx N' Effects concert in Tel Aviv can't come soon enough.
Ech omrim "Rump Shaker"?

Racism, Americans and Israelis, the Worst Word in the English Language, and When Can I Start Posting Funny Stuff Again?

Well, to those of you who like when I write serious, chew on this one for a few minutes...

I first thought about writing this post a year ago and put it off because it required too much thinking and I didn’t know how to do it sensitively. Hey, anybody want to talk about racism? Fun fun fun! Race is a sensitive subject in America and clearly we’re still not in a place where we can address it easily. The Henry Louis Gates incident and aftermath made that clear. Now…I have come to appreciate that for just about every cultural difference, there are positives and negatives to how Israelis and Americans act in a situation. TO GENERALIZE, Americans have rigid rules which I very much appreciate. They provide a framework for action, set expectations, and create a system where things run smoothly. However, in the event that you need to make room for an exception to the rules, it can be frustrating when Americans will not think outside the box or say anything but “I’m sorry, Sir, that is our policy” like a robot or broken record. In Israel, things are much more informal and rules can be negotiated. However, Israelis sometimes do not understand why systems and rules exist and have less respect for these rules which exist for the greater good and in the name of order. The point is that societies are different and often we can not appreciate the logic behind cultural norms in places where these societies evolved differently.

In my last job, I had the fortune (misfortune?) of trying to explain racial tensions, diversity, and political correctness to a few of my Israeli co-workers. Let me tell you...that was a freaking field day. One day, one of them jokingly used, ahem, what we all refer to as “the N-word.” Is there a more sensitive, frowned upon word in American English? No need to answer that question; we all know the answer is no. Hearing it usually elicits a reaction which includes an “OMIG-D, WHAT DID HE JUST SAY” and a look around to make sure nobody heard it. I forget how my co-worker (we’ll call him “Yoni”) first used it but it was probably in a joking comment about then Presidential candidate Barack Obama, satirizing dumb Americans. When it happened the first time, I probably said “OMIG-D, YOU CANNOT SAY THAT” while smiling because of the ridiculous sound of whatever fish-out-of-water Americanish statement he said in his non-American accent. (Sort of like if Borat were to say “I’m getting jiggy with it.” Foreigners are funny, we discussed this in one of my first ever blog posts.) Unfortunately what I came to realize is that at almost any age, when a friend pick up on something that bothers you, he is often likely to do it again, especially when you have even a small smile on your face. If I had given him and any of my other co-workers a mixed message, I made it clear VERY SOON AFTER that I didn’t find it funny while trying to teach them that WE DO NOT SAY THE N-WORD. It didn’t make a difference. They continued saying it to get a rise out of me which may have been secretly amusing in the way that a friend pushing another’s buttons can be funny. Still, the most disturbing thing was never their saying of the word. It’s a good question to debate: is there anything wrong with saying a word offensive in one country…in another? Is it offensive if I utter a racist Malaysian word in the middle of Wichita, Kansas where its social implications are stripped away and irrelevant? What more bothered me was that they apparently didn’t respect my explanation of how offensive it was and that I feared they didn’t understand its power. Speaking of cultural differences, for both better and worse, more than Americans, Israelis don’t spend a lot of time fretting about what others think of them as individuals and as a people which is part of why they’re able to speak their minds. So I do fear Joe Israeli speaking the word aloud in Randomtown, America and getting his ass shredded into falafel bits or even “just” using the word in public, offending others and representing us Jews and Israelis extremely poorly. (A year or so ago, there was a Facebook invite for a party in Israel where the hosts posted a picture of people dressed in white sheets. Anybody want to see that forwarded around the internet or showing up on CNN? Me neither. A bunch of Anglos wrote on the wall begging them to take it down which they eventually did.)

What I found difficult….impossible, actually….was to convey why a word held such offensive power to people living in a country where the related meanings, social implications, and history and hatred behind that word simply don’t exist. Why is it so fun and easy to say curse words in another language? Because they don’t mean anything to us. Eventually one woman in my department who had spent several years in America raised the topic at a departmental meeting, explaining why it offended her also and why it was such a horrible word. Not much changed. Whereas Yoni and others might have said the actual word to push my buttons, going forward they might have made the same joke but instead said “N-word” instead of the actual word or continued to push my buttons by hinting at it. Was I being too sensitive by letting them upset me? Maybe. Did they fully get it? I don't think so. (After one of them only a month ago wrote 'nig...' on my Facebook wall, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. I deleted it.)

Months later, I had a few conversations with another co-worker about political correctness. His take was that there’s something crazy and wrong about a society which spends so much mental energy arguing about labels and words. “What the hell is the difference between ‘blacks’ and ‘African-Americans’?” Forget that….what about “retarded” vs. “mentally challenged”? Or the granddaddy of them all, midgets vs. little people? He claimed that it is insane to change your labels every few years which I agreed with and that a special-needs person shouldn’t define himself by what he’s capable of and how much he can achieve, not by what label others define him with. All good points truthfully…but at the same time, in a country with such a history of racial problems, I appreciate where the PC movement came from and that it represents our effort to create equality, respect, tolerance, and empowerment, even if it’s not perfect.

Two weeks ago, as has been well-documented, Henry Louis Gates and Sergeant Jim Crowley got into it. Gates felt like he was racially profiled and Crowley felt disrespected as a cop. While I believe the cop probably was doing his job, I also respect that the situation is probably more complicated than my white eyes are able to see and that, as many have reported including Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, most of us are "just a little bit racist" whether we realize it or not. President Obama’s quick response and half-retraction confirmed that race is a complicated issue in America, whether or not my old co-workers can appreciate it or not.

I kept thinking, how would I explain this to them? Would they get it? Are we Americans just being silly here? Clearly the answer to the last question is no, isn’t it? Am I oversensitive when they say the N-word in a country where it doesn’t mean anything? Or does it mean something? And how much of it is "well, I can do x, y, and z because I'm part of said group, but YOU can't do x, y, and z..."? I’ve heard stories about officers using it in the army in a different context maybe to mean a slave or something. I cringed when I heard that….wouldn’t you, Americans? We should, shouldn’t we? Or would non-American eyes see it differently?

What do you think?

Epilogue: So what made me finally decide to write about this yesterday? After watching another CNN segment about the Gates incident at the airport, I board my plane to Atlanta and find my seat next to a black man. Possibly thinking I was in the back of a taxi cab in Tel Aviv, I said, "Hey, can I ask you a weird question?" "Yes." "I don't usually talk politics with strangers but what do you think of the whole Henry Louis Gates thing." "No comment."

Aaaaaaaaaaaawkwaaaaaaaaaaard!!!!!!!

I apologized for bringing it up. Later on, on my way back from the bathroom, I saw him recounting this to the black flight attendant. Yeah, there was probably no good way to raise that topic. I had a good laugh with my friend Philip about this later.