I’ve had a nagging suspicion for quite a while, and honestly,
it’s turned into more than just a suspicion by now, that I spend too much time
taking in information—whether important or unimportant—and not enough on my own
creative output. It’s probably something many of us, excluding those of you in
the truly creative fields like art and writing, find ourselves guilty of. “Ah,
yes, all of our genius just going to waste on tweets and Facebook status
updates.” I joked with a friend earlier today as we discussed my future that “I
just want something where I can utilize my potential – I mean, I’m above
average intelligence and pretty talented, right?” Of course, every idiot thinks
he’s the next Einstein. A simple scroll through your Facebook newsfeed confirms
that. Where do people get all that confidence, particularly those who
shouldn’t have it? Yep, if you can’t use an apostrophe correctly, I don’t need
to know your extremely deep thoughts on world politics—and certainly not last
night’s episode of Hoarders.
In any case, let’s just say that I’ve been on a blog-writing
hiatus since Ella was born. Sure, I had lots of interesting, not to mention
hilarious, and of course heart-wrenching, anecdotes to share since she came
along. Only thing lacking, I suppose, was time. Oh, and sleep. And the
occasional shower. All of which combined
to destroy any real creative energy. Thus, what few intelligent and humorous
thoughts survived were discussed during all those lengthy, wine-drenched
romantic dinners I was able to share with my husband, Nadav. Ha. Man, I crack
myself up.
As usual, though, I’ll apologize for not writing more, vow
to do write more often from here on out, and get to what I really wanted to
write about. Which is? Well, we moved. From Israel’s Silicon Wadi to the Bay Area’s very own Silicon Valley (silly of them to steal the name from
Israel with all the creative minds that can be found here, huh?). We’ve been
here about three months now, and we’ve managed to find and furnish a townhouse
(thank you, Craigslist), buy a car (thank you, shady used car salesman), and figure
out that northern Californians are apparently not fans of Walmart (sigh) but very
big fans of Target and Indian food. I attribute it to the area’s large
Indian population and the fact that Target was invented for yuppies—and this
must be the Yuppie Capital of the world, judging by the number of farmers’
markets they have here on the weekend. Let it be clear, I am not judging. I,
too, would like to consider myself young, and I sure hope I’m upwardly mobile.
Time will tell.
The (re-)adjustment to life in America, particularly
suburban America, has had its ups and downs. On the up side, there’s Amazon
(which got me an electric kettle a few days after moving in to our corporate
housing) and big grocery stores with everything you could possibly want and
people are polite. On the down side, you have to get in your car for
everything, it just isn’t as easy to make friends in casual situations as it
was in Israel, and we’re far away from family—whether it’s family in Israel or
family in America. Also, there’s the
myth of a northern California winter, which goes something like this: “The Bay
Area is great. It doesn’t get below 60 degrees all year round. You’ll love it.”
No, friends, it does get colder than 60 degrees. In fact, it gets 23 degrees
below 60 degrees—as in 37 degrees Farenheit—and not to be a wimp, but my Florida and
most-recently-Mediterranean blood cannot take it. Not to mention poor Nadav,
who convinced himself that since we were going to California, he only needed to
pack one pair of long pants.
