I cracked the other night, and by "cracking" I mean I burst out in laughter. It had been a tense week, during which I constantly thought about the following topics:
1) Find a new apartment
2) Find a replacement for old apartment
3) Arrange discount for city taxes
4) Visit advisor at university
5) Think about the fact that in less than 3 months I will be starting my master's degree in a foreign language
6) Work
7) Find apartment for my friend
8) The disengagement from Gaza and how I feel about it
and
9) Deal with the fact that there are not 1, not even 2, but no less than 4 guys who are interested in me right now
That, number 9, is what made me break and let out the laugh that brought me back to the ridiculousness of reality.
I titled this blog after the movie "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" because I realized two things today. First, I considered the possibility that perhaps I am NOT, by nature, a relaxed person. Second, the "bomb" that is life in Israel can make you a little stressed, and you're entitled to be that way. In the past, some of you may have gotten the impression of me that I am in fact a relaxed person. Well, it turns out that is one side of my personality. Luckily that side is usually in control. But, for instance, this morning when I woke up at 6: 30 am to arrive at the City Municipality to arrange for a discount in taxes (a feat more difficult than climbing Mt.Everest), arrived and found out that, for some reason, TODAY (of all days) they were not accepting applications for this, I muttered a few expletives and the other side came out.
I think you can give into this other side sometimes--it's healthy. But you can't let it control your life, your actions, your ideals. The thing that comes to mind right now is the disengagement, of course, because this is the only thing you seem to hear or read about these days. I think about how Israeli culture is one that flows, has an undercurrent of "It'll be ok." However, it is not this attitude that is shaping the country right now. It is the other more tense "We'll fight for our ideals even if it means dividing the Jewish people" attitude that is controlling our political ideologies, our outward political statements, even our attire.
Living in Jerusalem, one is bombarded (I suppose this is a very left-wing stance to take, for if I were more right-wing I could say "encouraged") by the color orange. Orange, for those of you don't know, is the color of the "revolution" (after Ukraine's recent political upheaval)--the fight against what seems to be the inevitible evacuation of Jewish communities in the Gaza strip. But it is exactly this doubt, or perhaps a proven certainty, of inevitability that encourages those who are anti-disengagement to move onward with their demonstrations (sometimes non-violent, sometimes not).
Something important to remember is that nothing in this region is inevitable. One need only look to the "inevitable defeat of the Jews" that five Arab countries claimed during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence to the "inevitable existence of a Palestinian state" to grasp that things change here overnight and what is signed, sealed, and delivered one day can be overturned the next.
The other color you see--as if we are all attending a Gator football game all the time--is blue. Orange and blue. Blue is the color being promoted by "Shalom Achshav" (Peace Now), a group founded in 1978 during the Egypt-Israel peace talks--it's the color that says, "I support what the government is doing pulling out of Gaza." To put it bluntly, you don't see much blue in Jerusalem, but when you do, it's like a ray of hope, even if it is coupled with an orange ribbon. What this combination means, I am unsure. Perhaps it signifies that we should all just get along? Perhaps it signifies that the wearer sympathizes with the Jewish settlers who are losing their homes but still thinks the disengagement is a good idea? Or, perhaps he is a gator?
I have chosen not to display my political beliefs in the form of a ribbon. Unfortunately, my favorite 2 bags are orange, and while I've thought about adding a sign that says, "My bag is not a political statement," I realize that as soon as I did, it would become one.
How is all of this connected to the title? The following anecdotes will shed some light:
Last week, I was standing at a bus stop (don't all of my epiphanies come while I am standing there?), when a bus from Beitar (ultra-religious Jewish settlement outside of Jerusalem) pulled up. A woman, hair covered and dressed in a long skirt, got off with her baby in her arms. With her free hand, she opened the baggage compartment under the bus only to find that her stroller (there were 5 others!) was out of reach. So, I asked her if she needed help, anticipating that she would point out her stroller and I could crawl under the bus to retrieve it. Instead, she handed me her baby. A woman I don't know handed me her baby while she crawled under the bus to get the stroller. As she opened up the stroller and I held the baby, two buses arrived, one of which I needed to take. The first passed by, but the second bus driver, realizing what was happening (ie I am holding some lady's baby and therefore cannot get on the bus!) waited and let me on.
This morning, we arrived to the municipality very early to get in line in order to receive our city tax discount for being new immigrants. The plan worked perfectly. We woke up early, we took the bus, we arrived, and we were even not so far back in line. The other people in line turned out to be computer technicians who were working in the department we needed to visit, and thus, our attempts were foiled. How can you just shut down a government office with no notice to the public? How can you expect people to just take off of work/school/life to arrange their stupid city taxes? How can every employee have a different story as to what the procedure was/is/will be? These are the questions I asked myself in the few seconds I stormed out of the place. Then I looked outside, and saw some people sitting on some shady steps. "Who are they?" I asked a clerk. "Oh, those are the people who give discounts on city taxes--I guess they didn't know we were closed today either." That's when it hit me--relax, or well, have a heart attack. Because I'm not here to change a society, a way of life. I'm not here to battle against the forces of slovenly government workers, the rudeness of people who think they are more important than you, or the inefficiency of seemingly every "professional" establishment one visits.
I'm here . . . to hold random people's babies. I'm here to buy a fan and have the 75-year-old salesman ask me when he can call me (number 5 on the boy list!). I'm here to wake up early in the morning to do something "important" (like city taxes) and end up sitting in a coffee shop--out of frustration or relaxation depending on the spin--just reading a Hebrew newspaper. And all the while, the orange and blue ribbons float by and make me realize that if I have to be surrounded by people in orange and blue--in colors that promote some sort of ideal--I'd rather those ideals be the future of my people than a football game. Because we all love the Gators, but changing the world is slightly more important.
