Ruminations

I've been thinking a lot about love lately.  Normally when I get this way I turn into a somewhat removed theorist--waxing hypotheses in a detached, pragmatic way.  Love is such and such, to love is to dot dot dot.  Now I have no theories, no definitions or philosophies or even concrete ideas.  My mind has simply wrapped itself around a short refrain that repeats itself over and over in my head: 

Risk it!  Risk everything!

A little stream of consciousness

I'm getting tired of writing about the things I'm doing here--the parties and the sightseeing, the classes and the papers, what have you.  All these external things--even the extraordinary place where I live--all of these refuse to penetrate at the moment, and I'm left walking around inside my own head.  Not walking.  More like treading water.

I am not unhappy.  I am not even panicky or anxious.  I am just confused.

We only get one life, you see.  We either use it to seek truth, or we give up and start to collect things.  I want to be good, I want to be kind, I want to be pure of heart, but I don't know if I want to look for truth anymore.  Suddenly it seems very, very silly, like investing in something that will never yield any actual result, that will never make any visible impact, that will merely serve as some sort of spiritual pacifier that calms me but doesn't nourish me, eases everything but changes nothing.  I don't want to cling to something because it makes life more bearable or makes me feel like a part of something or gives me a sense of identity.  I want to believe in something because it's true, not just for me but for everybody, and this, this I suspect may not exist at all.

Hanukkah

This has been a rough week.  I'm battling a shapeless little loneliness here, and it's tiring.  I'm having another of those disconnected days--I want to plug myself in somewhere, lean on something for balance, only there's no place, really, for me to go.

It's been a rough week

I went to a party last Thursday night.  It was fun, I suppose, but not terribly.  Anyway, the point is, apparently someone stole my bank card right out of my purse that night.  I had it in a small pocket--I'd left my wallet at home--along with some cash.  The next day the cash was still there, but the card was gone.  At first I figured that I must've taken it out and lost it or something, so I wasn't too worried.  But then last night I checked out my account information online and there were $250 worth of charges that I didn't make.  I spent the better part of the evening on the telephone to USbank cancelling the card.  So I'll get a new one within a week or two, but meanwhile I have no access to cash.  Blech.  Who would steal a bank card from someone's purse at a party?  Am unhappy about the whole affair.

I am not really here right now

I've mostly been back in Cleveland the past few days since I heard that a friend's stepfather, who I've known for years, passed away.  I've been in this kind of surreal stupor, trying not to think too much about what happened or worry about Sangeeta, trying to concentrate on my work and on my friends here, but I find myself dialing her number quite a bit and she's never home.  I wonder if she would rather people not call for a while, if she would rather be left alone.

No news is good news

I've been going through a bit of a clumsy spell.  Yesterday I knocked over a chair in the cafeteria, and then later, as I was trying to sneak out of class early, I managed to spill the entire contents of my backpack onto the floor with a remarkable clatter.  These things happen to me sometimes.

Am in the middle of midterms, three down and two to go.  I have no idea how I did on the papers, but I think I did okay on the Arabic test, in spite of all my fears.  Maybe I am learning something after all.

I haven't been up to that much lately.  Went out to dinner the other night, had a few drinks with some friends last night, the usual passing of the days.  But I feel satisfied and full, as if I've lived here a long time; my life has taken on an easy rhythm.  I am happy, I guess.

Israel has also been pretty quiet.  Kati wants me to write more about what's going on here, but the truth is I rarely know.  I read somewhere that attacks on Israelis have gone down 70% since Arafat died, but that strikes me as an odd statistic.  Everything else--moving along, hunkering down for winter, settling.

Thanksgiving

It's freezing in Jerusalem.  It rained all weekend, and yet I still braved the streets for Thanksgiving dinner at my friend's house.  There were three enormous tables set up in their living room, around which sat forty or fifty (mostly non-American) friends.  They made everyone say something they were thankful for, but I and the rest of the cynics waited on the balcony until that part was over.  It's not that I'm not thankful or anything, it's just that I knew maybe ten of the people there, and I'm not much for public speaking.

So we ate and made merry, and I endured the usual barrage of American jokes (we killed the Indians after Thanksgiving, we have no table manners, no real culture...you know the drill), but mostly it was a really good time.  In the end, Luise and I ended up at Dave's in a really silly mood, and sat laughing and talking about nothing until 3:30 in the morning.  A nice Thanksgiving, in spite of the homesickness that comes with the territory.

I am procrastinating

I am working on this instead of my mini-paper that's due tomorrow, which I have been avoiding all week.  It's a critical review of (part of) Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise.  This shouldn't be so difficult, but I'm at a loss as to how to begin.  My solution: type.  Anything.  Thus here I am, hoping the very feel of keys beneath my fingertips will trigger some kind of reaction in my writing faculty.

Soon I leave to go into town with some girls for dinner.  I don't go out to eat very often, unless you count the cafeterias at University, so I'm looking forward to food I don't have to prepare and/or clean up.  I'm also looking forward to the same thing tomorrow night, when I go to my friend Dave's for Thanksgiving dinner, and don't need to cook anything at all.  Apparently there are like forty people coming, much bigger than my little intimate Thanksgiving last year.

Anyway, suddenly I have an idea.  So off to work I go.

Week five

Went to several parties this weekend.  At the first one, the police came three times before one o'clock.  They always come, and they're always nice, but they pretty much broke up the party.  I didn't mind so much though, as it had suddenly turned into one of those predatory parties where Luise and I were practically the only girls left in a sea of men.  I felt like a little bunny, about to be pounced on. 

The next day, Shimon, Luise's exiled ex-roomate, threw a little get-together at his new apartment, right smack next to the emergency room at the hospital.  We ate sushi and drank banana and vodka shakes.  It doesn't get much better than that.

Yesterday I did barely anything at all.  It was shabbat, after all.  I did manage to finish my Arabic and a little reading, and I made pasta for myself and Luise, who has taken to sleeping over every Saturday night.

Essays

So I wrote the first of my mid-term essays and saved it to a disk to print out at school, and somehow the disk was all messed up and I lost all the corrections and the conclusion to the paper, which I (stupidly) forgot to save to my computer.  It took me an hour and a half to write the entire essay, and it has taken me two days to reconstruct a single paragraph.  I find this extremely annoying.  I literally cannot remember how I ended it before, and cannot for the life of me pull it together now.  Am incensed.  (is that how you spell that?)

So now I have to finish it, as well as some critical review of some Spinoza article.  Hooray.  I feel really loaded down with work this semester.  Arabic is 100 times more difficult than last year, and Hebrew moves so fast I can't keep up.  I'm spinning all around!  But overall, I am too busy to be depressed or anxious most of the time.  I almost feel completely back to normal.

Update

Last Thursday I went to my friend Danai's house in Abu Tor, East Jerusalem, to have the evening Ramadan meal with her family.  Their home was really beautiful, and we ate until our sides hurt.  Afterwards we sat in the living room and drank Arab coffee and talked about everything, with Arafat's funeral playing on the TV in the background.  Only the women were left, Danai, her sister, and two other girls from Rothberg; the men left right after dinner.

Danai's sister read our futures in the coffee grounds left over in our cups, which was quite entertaining.  Apparently I will very soon meet a very tall man, who will love me from the first moment that he sees me.  (Why are they always tall in fortune-telling?)  I will never have a lot of money, but I will never care.  I will attain whatever I go after, but it will take hard work.  All sorts of neat stuff like that.  It was quite fun.

Clarification

Due to the nature of some of the responses that I have received from my post a few days ago, I decided I needed to clarify a few things.  At the time I was much too angry to form a coherent argument, so I instead resorted to satire, a tool that I find to be (generally) quite effective.  However, it may not be so effective at the time because, unfortunately, there are so many people in the world right now who would whole-heartedly agree with the ridiculous stance I took to mock them.

So, a bit of an argument then.  I suppose I should start with why we have laws.  I plan on being simplistic and non-philosophical here, so excuse my lack of true investigation into the matter.  We have laws to maintain order in society, to moderate and standardize behavior, to protect individuals from each other, and to determine right from wrong.  Fine then.

That being said, there are two different types of law.  There are laws that deal with matters of justice, and laws that deal with matters of morality.  In America, a country founded on freedom of thought, opinion, and religion, basically the right to believe whatever one desires, we divide these laws: the state turns matters of justice into universal law, while matters of morality are (supposedly) left to the individual to decide--Christians follow their moral law, Jews follow theirs, Muslims, Atheists, etc.  All are free to decide what is right and what is wrong.

What then separates a Universal Law of Justice, which is regulated by the state, and an Individual Law of Morality, regulated by one's religion, creed, or conscience?  Precisely this: a universal just law is one that draws the line between the rights of the individual and the rights of those he lives with.  Once his right impedes on the rights of others, it is no longer his right.  Thus, it is legal to hate people; it is illegal to hurt them,  It is legal to have sex with whomever you choose, whether married or not, it is not legal to rape or sexually abuse someone.  It is legal to buy pornography, it is not legal to peep into other people's windows.  I could go on and on.  I will stay away from the "grayer" areas, prostitution, drug use, etc, as they can be argued from either side.

Homosexuality, however, cannot.  There is nothing gray about the right of a man or a woman to be gay, as it obviously does not impede on the rights of anyone else.  It hurts no one, disrupts nothing in society, and is simply not a matter of justice. 

It can, of course, be argued by some that it is a violation of morality, but we have already shown that morality is not to be decided by the state.  It seems to me that Christians in the USA, now comfortably accustomed to being in the majority, have forgotten how precarious this situation can be in history.  I live in Jerusalem, which over the course of thousands of years has been through its share of occupiers, all of them exercising the right to legislate their own idea of morality, and all of them indifferent to the suffering it caused to those who disagreed with them.  Christians in America are not bothered by the idea of legislating morality because, at the moment, they are safe in the knowledge that it will be their morality, but they forget that this may not always be the case.

Once you set such a dangerous precedent, you are not far off from destroying the very ideals our country was founded on; in fact you are already beginning to destroy them.  How is it that Christians forget that in certain countries, Christianity itself is "immoral," and that its followers must practice their faith illegally and in secret?  Surely we would call this law an unjust law, as it imposes one group's morality onto another and restricts freedom.  Thus, while Universal Law is truly just law, as it protects rights (by restricting freedoms, yes, but only those freedoms which could harm another), Moral Law, when it no longer is left up to the individual, is unjust.

So how can one possibly argue that the right to marry should be restricted to those whose moral code calls marriage a union between a man and a woman?  Certainly two gay men in love, who desire to make a life-long commitment to each other, should have the right to do so, and have it recognized by the state that claims its citizens have the right to decide their own morality?  I have heard people worry that it would destroy the "sanctity of marriage."  Last I checked, the "sanctity of marriage" was not a person, and therefore doesn't fall under the protection of universal law.  We are free to destroy it at will, as we do every day with our (legal, I remind you) divorces, illicit affairs, and many other things.  I am not arguing whether these things are right or wrong; I believe I have pointed out that this has no bearing on the argument whatsoever.  I am merely pointing out that "marriage" as most Christians view it, is being violated every day, with the protection of the law.  But as long as it is heterosexuals violating marriage as depicted by the Christian Bible, we will tolerate it.  It is only when homosexuals expect the state (THE STATE, mind you, not the church, which I believe does have the right to prohibit gay marriage if it sees that as morally sound) to extend to them the right to marry that Christians start weeping and gnashing their teeth.  They wail and cry--just call it something else, just don't call it marriage, how can you call it marriage?--and their attachment to semantics, to a name, which is not holy at all (it is the act of marriage, I believe, that is holy--it must be, as Adam and Eve are never said to be "married" and somehow I doubt that Christians hold their union to be suspect), blinds them to the suffering they are causing those who disagree with them.  They think they are doing God a favor by "protecting" his morality, when in fact they are hurting him by hurting and alienating those he loves, which includes homosexuals.

A little hopeless

I finally bought my plane ticket home for Christmas.  It was obscenely expensive.  But I know it will be worth it.  I could use a little connection with my hometown, as usual.

I feel as if my state of mind is constantly balanced  on this precarious little peak, arms outstretched, willing itself to maintain some sort of equillibrium.  This balancing is difficult and time-consuming, and often fails, at which point I suddenly find myself plunging into a state of semi-despair, fighting off the most ridiculous sense of hopelessness. 

I have the most extreme emotional reactions to the most mundane of everyday events.  The other day I was the last to arrive to an over-crowded class, and the only seat that was left was all alone in the corner, and I was suddenly overcome with this enormous feeling of isolation.  I had to leave the class, walk around a little bit, remind myself of things.  Then yesterday I got in an argument with a taxi driver about the fare, and it took me two hours to get over the sense of having fallen from a great distance.  It is so strange, being so tightly coiled all the time.  I want to stretch myself out, relax, but I can't.

It makes me think that I will never be able to be completely happy in the life that I've chosen.  I am twenty-seven, single, living in a strange culture; most of my friends are transitory; most everything is transitory.  I need to be living in some small town, where I know everybody, where they all know me, where I can have a nice routine, a couple kids, and a house with a front porch.  I need to put down feet to feel balanced.  Instead I'm running all over the place, collecting degrees, experiences, and photographs, in a constant state of near-panic.

This is probably better.  This life. 

Those gays

I am so proud of my country right now. Finally we are taking a stand for what is decent, Christian, and American. It's bad enough that the gays are actually allowed to remain in God's chosen nation, now they insist on having the same rights as the rest of us--the God-fearing majority. I am appalled by this. Clearly it is the result of liberal-minded history teachers telling our children that America was founded on religious freedom, rather then telling them the truth--America was founded on the freedom to be a Christian. We fled that sinful England to make a haven for the moral majority, and look where we are now. Look what's happening to our values, our foundation, our very identity!

Thus, with the overwhelming passing of Issue One in Ohio and several other states, I have finally begun to see a glimmer of hope. Hope that one day America will be the country that our parents remember. Hope that one day my children will be able to live in a country of innocence and purity, where marriage is sacrosanct and the gays know their place. But folks, we cannot stop here. If we really want to clean up this country for Jesus, then I submit that we make several more amendments to the constitution--(remember the constitution? protecting the rights of Christians to live in a holy nation, ruled by a Christian? how quickly we forget). So here is my rather modest proposal:

Other immoral acts that should be made illegal:

Adultery: The gays like to point out how very few and how very ambiguous are the verses against homosexuality in the Bible. Well, this certainly cannot be said for adultery, a terrible sin that is constantly mentioned in the Good Book--both Old and New Testaments. God hates the adulterer as much as he hates the gays--so how can we live in a country that condones this behaviour by allowing it to be legal? How can this not be prosecutable by law? I submit policemen to work at every seedy hotel, every casino, office place, bar and nightclub, every fleshpot and sin-ridden place that still exists in America, waiting to catch the adulterer when he strikes, waiting to throw him into jail where he belongs.

Pre-marital sex: Fornication is rampant in this country. Nobody knows how it happened, or why it's so "accepted," but I think I do. Because it's legal. We look to our laws to tell us what is and isn't morally acceptable, and here we have no law preventing--nay, protecting--our kids from committing an inexcusable act.

Drunkenness: Now, I'm not old-fashioned. We all know prohibition was a mistake. Even Jesus drank wine! The point is not to make alcohol illegal, but to make drinking in excess illegal. Saint Paul makes it clear what a sin it is to be drunk, makes it clear that it leads to debauchery, whatever that is. So let the people have their wine, just make sure there's a limit. A moral society must have limits, or sin and the devil will undermine and ruin us.

Reading religious books that aren't the Bible: How can we let our children be exposed to other faiths, faiths that we know to be pagan and godless? At the moment, you can walk into any bookstore and find a copy of the Koran, the Satanic Bible, whatever those Buddhists read--all sorts of nefarious and anti-Christian writings--out in the open for anyone to take home and read, out in the open just waiting to lead Americans astray. I propose a ban on all such anti-God books. I also find certain other books suspect--The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, anything written by a Jew, basically any fiction that contains objectionable references, which is most fiction written before 1935 and after 1959, as well as a lot of the stuff actually written between those years. In fact, as it is hard to judge, all fiction must be considered a threat. As well as any supposed "non"-fiction that includes the evolutionary theory, references to the big bang, reproduction, or a non-geo-centric view of the universe, as well as anything containing discussions of any religion other than the American Religion.

Television: This barely needs an explanation at all.

Dancing: While not specifically mentioned in the Bible as a sin, I go along with the radical Christian unversities that prohibit this exceptionally dangerous act. Maybe it's not a sin, per se, but we all know what it leads to. Let's not kid ourselves. Again I say: outlaw the deviant act.

Well, there are many, many more that I could list--and plan to!--but unfortunately I have to go do some housework, as I am a Christian woman who knows where her place is. Let that be a lesson to the anti-American masses of women who think it's "okay" to be in the workplace while their children raise themselves. Shame on you! Perhaps one day America will return to its better, purer roots and keep us out of the working world and the ballot box, and back in the kitchen where God intended us to be!

Halloween

Had a Halloween party the other day, complete with pumpkins (construction paper), s'mores (on the gas stove), and hot spiked apple cider (apple "drink"). It was kind of hastily planned, but it turned out okay. I get this hostess-syndrome, and it's hard for me to enjoy my own parties--I'm running around all nervous trying to make sure people are having fun, eating, drinking, still like me. Stuff like that.

Not much else to share at the moment. I'm trying to get a plane ticket home, and it's awful. It's much more expensive then I'd anticipated, and the dates are filling up fast. Ah well. It'll work itself out, right?

Adds and drops

It's Wednesday already. The year has at last begun its crazy spinning, and I am left feeling like suddenly there is no time left for anything. A very different feeling from the past few weeks, but a welcome one.

I have decided at last which classes I am going to take this semester. The official list: Islamic and Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages; Issues in the Rise of the Islamic World; Magic, Science and Religion in the World of Late Antiquity; and the Hebrew Bible in its Near Eastern Historical Context (or something like that); along with Hebrew, Arabic, and hopefully German. Hooray! My cup runneth over.

Tonight a bunch of people are coming over for sushi. Tammy is making it, and she, as usual, has gone all out. I am greatly anticipating the final result of her efforts.

If my language on this blog becomes--shall we say--slightly academic sounding, as in the previous sentence, blame it on the one hundred pages of long-winded scholarly articles I read every day. I am starting to think in that style. I am not amused by this at all.

Carrying on

I feel better today. It's odd to suffer from nameless anxiety after a year of relative calm. Not even relative calm: complete and utter normalcy. I suppose the way I felt last year is the way that normal people feel all the time. When my European friends hear that I was on Paxil, normally they smile, roll their eyes, and say something like "You Americans." And I guess that the steady rise of prescription medication is an American trend. Maybe--no, probably--we medicate ourselves way too much, treating the symptoms instead of the problem. The problem with most depressed Americans, in my opinion: work that means nothing to them, isolation, loneliness, lack of purpose and direction, lack of exercise, and overall boredom. To combat this, instead of changing jobs, joining a gym, and doing whatever it takes to end the feeling of isolation, they take an anti-depressant. I'm sure this happens a lot.

But here is where my problem lies: I am working at something that I love, that fascinates me. I have friends who care about me, (mostly) clear and defined goals, and a (decent) sense of purpose.  I am happy. The anxiety that I feel never comes from an actual situation, from something concrete. The hopelessness, the sadness--none of it comes attached with a solution, a cure, or even a reason.

Luckily, it's not that severe. It does get worse in times of high stress, but mostly it's how I described it last night: a constant, dull sort of tug on my subconscious, a feeling that something is not quite right. A bit of obsessive-compulsion helps keep it at bay: when my house is clean, my studies in order, and the dishes done, the tug is less. When everything's a mess, when things go wrong, when I'm running late, the tug gets stronger. And when things in my life are complicated or difficult, the tug becomes an out and out tug-of-war between my rational mind, which understands that this is chemical, crazy, untrue, and my irrational feelings, which tell me that something is wrong, awful, about to be lost forever.

In the past I learned certain ways of controlling this. And when it was so bad that I couldn't control it, I just kind of held on until it passed. And last year, right before I left for Israel, when it was the worst it's ever been and I couldn't eat or sleep or even stop shaking, I finally decided to try Paxil. I've known a lot of people who tried it with no effect, or who went through some really awful side effects, but I responded really well almost right away. I responded so well, in fact, that I convinced myself that it must have been the placebo effect, and went off the drug. Two weeks later I was an absolute mess. So back on I went.

And now, over the summer, I decided to go off it. My life has stabilized, the stress factors are gone, and I was ready to go back to my old methods of controlling and living with my own little insanity. And I'm fine. Most of the time I am fine. But during those weird evenings--when I wake up at six in the morning with my heart pounding and my breath coming in hysterical sips and I am gripped by a pointless panic about nothing at all--on those evenings I wonder if it might not be so bad to be on a drug for the rest of my life.

But those evenings are few and far between, and meanwhile the fact that I feel creative and even crazy again is really comforting to me. So off it I will stay.

There's my explanation for last nights whimperings.

Perfect

First day of classes. But never mind. It's all a blur to me, feeling now so acutely that odd sense of panic I used to be so accustomed to. It's just a small thing. A pea beneath a hundred mattresses kind of thing. But there nonetheless. It's like the smallest, barely detectable layer right underneath my skin: it says nothing but negative words--loss, wrong, never. I don't know what I feel, except that I feel alone again. This is not something I entirely reject. Being alone is an amazing opportunity for growth. It's just that I was hoping my days of being alone were coming to an end, and yet it seems that God is intent on wringing me dry forever.

Whatever it takes to need him alone, I suppose. Only: am I this strong that I need this kind of desperation?

Psyche

So today is one of those days. I find myself, in my loneliness, searching for things to fill up the hours between sleep and sleep: surf the net--one hour; go to the library--three hours; study hebrew and arabic--two hours; watch tv--two hours; read "the story of art"--two hours. That still leaves me with six unused hours. I have options; I can do the touristy thing, go hang out with Gosia, take a walk. But loneliness is a paralysis for me, so I do nothing.

I spent one of these six unused hours talking to Jef, which was, of course, wonderful. He did his best to pull me from my stupor, and meanwhile I nagged him with questions he can't answer. Will all my dreams come true? Will I be happy? Will I die alone? Will I get to have children? He was amused/frustrated/...Jef. I miss him a lot. Difficult to write too much on a website that I know he reads; suffice to say: talking to him made me happy, for a little while.

Ksenia gets home tomorrow, Luise on Thursday, Tammy on Saturday, then school starts on Sunday. So much outside stimulation in rapid succession (is that spelled right?) is bound to liven me up. I should end up with less than one unused hour a day!

I am safe and sound

I came back to Jerusalem last night in a terrifyingly crowded bus. I can definitely tell that I'm no longer taking Paxil, as I was panic-stricken the whole way. The bus seemed to stop every few yards to pick up more people, and while normal Israelis slept or listened to their walkmans, I stared at every face that entered, positive that a suicide bomber was going to take advantage of so many Israelis packed like sardines into one tiny space and blow us all to hell. I miss medication sometimes.

Well, back to my travels. The day after I went to Akko, Dror and his family, who were all on vacation, took me sightseeing around the area. We stopped at a village called Paki'in, or something like that, where Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Druze all live together in relative harmony. We paid a visit to a friend of the family, a wonderfully friendly Druze man who insisted on feeding us his wife's stuffed grape leaves and Kube, salads and potatos, and numerous other treats. After that we went to see an old Crusader fortress that had been rebuilt by the Ottomans--a recurring theme in the North--from the top of which we could see all the way to Haifa. Finally we stopped at what Dror claimed to be the best sweet shop in Israel--nay, the world--where we ate something called ktufa(?), a middle eastern pastry covered with syrup and pistachio nuts. It was extremely yummy.

That night, we joined a bunch of neighbors from the village and ate outside (near the sukkah, but not in it, as it was too small--but that counts, doesn't it?) and made fresh pita on the fire, bedouin style. By this time I noticed a dramatic improvement in my Hebrew, as I hadn't spoken English in two days, and I got along quite nicely in the conversation. Slowly, slowly. Anyway, it was a beautiful night. One with just the right amount of magic.