some girlie out there must be needy for a weedy shy guy

yesterday we went early to the volcani center. we did the normal mulch sifting and kid watching. there's these two huge kids that looks way older than 12 but have attitudes like you've never seen. however, they got into manual labor. it made me proud. hung out with rachael of course. she's a joke. in the best way. i found out that her birthday is in a week. she even asked me to take photos of her. i'll print them for her as a gift. once we were done with the normal maintenance, we all took a walk through the compound to check out the expanse of fruit tree fields. we walked by the olive orchard. i fucking hate olives, but alice heard that if you strip a branch down to its core and rub your teeth with it, it makes them whiter. i don't know about that, but she thinks it works. so that matters. our walk led us to the orange trees, where we were allowed to pick a few each. these oranges are so amazingly ripe, that their peels would come off with the branch as you pulled the fruit off. really delicious. after we ate a terribly disgusting meal (really bad, i'm not picky), we got dropped off at home. OH, there's one kid in our volcani group that gets off the bus near our house. one day last week, alice and i were walking past a house caddy corner from ours that had it's door wide open. we glanced inside as we walked past and noticed a considerably medium-sized framed portrait of this kid just up on the wall directly in front of the entrance. we died laughing of course. shlomo is his name. he thought it was really amusing when we told him about it on our walk home from the bus stop.

we arrived home with enough time to go to kadima and hang out with the kids before going to tel aviv for david's goodbye party. worked with gal on english. she's probably my favorite kid there, really hilarious one. very quick and very sweet. i feel like i actually helped her with her sheet. she told me i spoke hebrew well, albeit slowly. "leat, leat", she says. we broke for breaking breakness and played some soccer at the court. all the little boys want alli on their team because she's the best ever. i'm like the fat kid that doesn't get picked for dodgeball. literally and metaphorically. except it's soccer. i always get directed to the goal on the opposing team. i have no street cred soccer-wise with these kids. i need to get better and practice, so i can actually have fun playing this game. even in high school i was terrible, but i knew enough to make some good decisions on the field so i could enjoy the thing. even the boys are becoming more friendly, though. on the way out to the court, i started to race a couple of them. i had almost won, when i noticed that two of them had stopped, and it looked like one was crying on the curb, the other comforting him and motioning for me to come over and help. i stopped running and walked back to see if i could make the kid feel better or at least find out what was wrong. as i knelt down, in comfort-mode, both boys shot up, pointing and laughing, as they ran full speed to the court, beating me at my own game. it was a good one. i was pretty impressed. also, the other day at kadima, one of the little punk asses (nisim) was trying to play guitar when alice and i stopped by to say hi. so i asked if i could help him figure out the song. i'm not the best guitarist ever, but i think it broke some ice somewhere so that i could communicate with him in connection with music as opposed to football or words. anyway, got home after kadima, worked on music a little, made mac and cheese for al and myself, and took a shower so that i didn't smell.

when it was time, we caught a sheruit to the sub kuch, where we arrived and promptly order 2 beers. i had the idea while riding that i'd add one photo per post that is related to the post itself. that's not happening this time. because _______ excuse. plus, there was a little person. at the bar, etan decided that he's great at interpreting a woman's personality by what's in her purse. he concluded that...

i am:
always prepared, by my pen
scared of technology, by my ancient phone
thinking i'm funny, from an andrew tolentino poster
loving music, from my ipod
a photographer, from my camera
on my period, from my tampon
not getting laid, from my lack of condoms

not bad huh? we also got into a conversation about love (al's favorite, my worst subject). he said that any successful, love relationship needs two things to make it work: 1) sex and 2) tolerance of the other's flaws. he used flirting as an example. it's weird. i don't even remember what its like to be in a relationship even though it was 4 and a half years long. etan insisted that there is no automatic love. it doesn't just emerge from nothing, but must be cultivated and evolve over time, which i have believed in the past when i beleved things about love and relationships. i tend recently to have not much enlightening to say on the subject, but ust being open to whatever direction i take myself or am taken or something. (as a sidenote, alice said something to me that made a lot of sense but scared and annoyed me at the same time... we were walking from a quick errand and we walked back home through the park. i started walking on the sidewalk and she cut through the park on a hill. i cut my path and walked the direction she had charted. she said, "you like paths a lot, i noticed". that idea doesn't sit well with me. probably because it is true and not a positive thing. i don't want to be a sheep among the herd. but i'm afraid that it is exactly what i am. really annoying) anyway, the bar playlist was the soundtrack from the film, fear and loathing in las vegas, which plays narration from the book, also in the film, before each song. one passage in particular was read out loud to me by dr. blake hestir at the beginning of an existentialism class the day that hunter s. thompson killed himself. blake was obsessed with thompson, and it made me think of him, so i gave him a call not expecting an answer. i was pleasantly surprised to be wrong in this moment. so we talked briefly and we updated each other as basically as possible before my phone started to cut out. i told him i'd email him, but it was really lovely to talk with blake as he was such a hugely important person for me during college. later, at the bar, i met one craig kinsey from texas. much older man. aging gypsy rocker from houston (whom i found out today, is in a band with one of my friend's boyfriends. really twisted. he's staying at the subkuch and very friendly. hopefully i'll see him play on sunday.

alice and i continue to wait for david, and treat ourselves. i head up to daniel's room, thinking alice is on my heels. she doesn't join and after about 30 minutes, i go to check to make sure she's ok, expecting to see her at the bar or in the gallery or even out front of the restuarant. no dice. i walk back up to daniel's room to see if she found her way there, but i was greeted instead by david, which was a lovely suprise. i told him i didn't know where alli was, so he accompanied me on a search mission around the corner, and up a really creepy and dark staircase. he even thought he heard her cell ringing the 13th time i called her. no answer. i went back through the subkuch, upstairs and downstairs, but no alli. i decided to walk the streets because sagi tipped me off that she was on the phone the last time i saw her. so at this point, alice is 1 of 4 possibilities:

1) dead
2) sleeping
3) with a boy
4) upset and wandering the streets

so i wander the streets, calling her name. like an idiot. but i didn't care. i wasn't really scared, because her phone was still on. just kind of nervous. i went back to daniel's room, who called her from his phone with no answer after david tried the same thing. he can tell that i'm nervous about her whereabouts, but calms me down anyway. he says he'll be right back. about 5 minutes later, daniel returns, saying that he's brought me a present and lo and behold, al comes dragging in behind him, smiling sleepily. she had fallen asleep on the bathroom floor, in the dark, at the top of the stairs, WHERE i had looked already. but not carefully enough apparently. we laughed about the whole thing and said our very sad goodbyes to david whom we won't see for a while, since he's going back to germany for the holidays. i will miss him. we make the most unexpected friends.

we walked down the street to the ATM to get cash for a sheruit after getting some munchies at the kiosk. upon the realization that we won't be able to catch a sheruit until 5AM, we hop in a cab, which takes us directly, and expensively right to our door. good quotes and a quick ride home. it's all worth it. we get home and have to climb through the kitchen window again since there's a kiey in the door already. alice breaks jodi's spice bottle, spilling mounds of chili powder all over the kitchen floor. really pretty though. reminded me of those sand bottles you make as a kid.

this morning, we slept through ulpan. woke up late, like assholes, and walked to the bank and then to the market to buy stuff for grilled cheese sandwiches. after making a series of very bad, delicious decisions, we checked out and went back home to fulfill our clogged destinies in the kitchen. our kitchen electricity is fucked, so we had to grill cheeses in our room with the panini maker. then ate. then continued hanging out until it was time to walk to the TV station. karen was not actually there, so we left and bought soup at rambo's neighborhood market. rambo is a little dude that looks very much like sylvester stallone. i'll take a photo of him. he's hilarious. very friendly guy. we arrived back and al made some delicious mushroom soup that we put cream and little crackers in. after dinner, i picked the 6 most interesting photos (posted soon) that the kids took the other day so that i could print them and show them next class. i ran with al to the print shop with my burned CD. i'll pick them up tomorrow. really excited. on the way home, there was a pile of broken or dismanlted bike parts just laying there. on the street. discarded and unattended. so naturally, alice and i scrounged up what matching parts we could grab in two trips and posted them up to fix them later. really exciting stuff. i can now be a bike friend. they're fixer-uppers for sure. relaxing, we invited imanuel over for a visit. he came and brought tim-tams. this is important later. we hung out talking and listening to music. conspiracy theories came up as a topic of conversation and how israeli's can't keep secrets so conspiracies, such as the rabin assassination, could not really exist. but the moon landing isn't real, we all agreed. i'll need to do more research on that. we made coffee and dug into the tim-tams. i started to dip mine in my coffee when i was reprimanded. i was eating them the wrong way. you're supposed to bite the caddy-corners off and suck the coffee through the hole on one end with the other hole in the hot liquid. basically, the end result is a perfectly melted chocolate melty good pile of chocolate goodness and hot coffee. its fucking the best thing i've ever put in my mouth ever in life. wow. i'm a changed woman. we had a little photo shoot for imanuel and his monstrous afro. really fantastic. then we showed him outside to see if he can help us with bikes (as well as help finding a place to live, not to mention bringing over 'heart of gold' neil young's concert DVD). he just about died laughing when he saw the bike parts we grabbed. but i know that we'll put them to good use. al and i watched nobody's fool after imanuel left. she fell asleep. for some reason, it made me really sad. i missed josh. or rather, i missed what it felt like to be so closely intimate with someone. it feels so far away now. after the movie was over, i logged online and saw him. so we chatted. and i feel better. i told him that only now am i dealing with the feelings stirred up by ending something so long term and serious. he knows how i feel. we had a good chat. i'm just really glad we're still such good friends. also, another good pal of mine reminded me about the nature of external systems of natural reactions and that being scared of what i'm doing is pretty unnecessary considering that animals don't get scared to observe other animals. unless said animal is a mouse observing a snake. or something like this... so thanks for that. and everything. buddies.

in other news, alice and i are going to be talking to birthright groups about ISC, which is exciting. we got the dates and locations today. in other other news, i'm sleepy. tomorrow is a new day. fuck man. yeah.

i'm proud of you,

sally