Musical Cars

People ask me what it’s like to be back in America/Los Angeles. Usually I tell them about how I spend my unemployment watching movies about Amish people on Netflix. Often I talk about how totally hollow Episcopalians are. Sometimes I mention both.

But I should probably mention how great it is to have music again. And by music I mean a car.

I should probably back up and explain to foreigners and less fortunate Americans that Angelenos have quite a car culture. Everything is so spread out, and you have to drive everywhere. Last week, during my quest to find a kiddie pool at Toys R Us (I want to vomit just writing that name), I ended up on a trek across the parking lot that took longer than did my walk from my flat in Oxford to the city center, which was in a different zip code.

Granted, I had parked on the edge of the parking lot because it was full—for some reason everyone decided to congregate at Toys  R Us at 2 p.m. on a workday. I mean, I know why I have nothing better to do with my life, but what is the rest of Los Angeles’ excuse? Are we ALL unemployed? This parking lot the size of Oxfordshire is full, and Holy Hank there are cars all over the road. Traffic everywhere. Good God, is the recession so bad that about 50% of all Angelenos at any given moment are loitering, and loitering in a moving vehicle?

Anyway, my point is that I am in the car a lot. Usually marveling at the traffic and screaming at no one in particular, “WHERE THE FUCK ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE GOING AT 11 A.M. ON A WEDNESDAY?!”

When I’m not screaming at the world to get a job and get off the road, I sing. Really loudly. You might know that I do not sing in front of other people, even when others are singing, instead preferring to lip sync or stand in rigid silence like a small child wanting to stay up after her bedtime: “Maybe if I stand still enough they’ll forget I’m here.” Fair enough, I can think of two notable exceptions:

1)      In elementary school I joined the choir. Not because I wanted to sing, but because my friends could sing and I didn’t want to be alone at lunch when they rehearsed. I lip synced at all the concerts and rehearsals, except when we did “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

 

      My God did I get into that song. 11 year old Sam felt born to sing that song—heck, I STILL feel born to sing that song. So into that song was I that I tried to do not only the a-wee-mo-weh parts but also the high pitched howl, even when the two were supposed to be sung simultaneously by different people. “Fuck you,” 11 year old Sam said to the rest of the choir through her singing, “I got this one.”

2)      Then there was the kibbutz laundry room. I’ve mentioned it a million times before, but in case you didn’t know, I once spent half a year of my life folding towels in a laundry room in Israel. When I wasn’t folding towels I was accidentally getting parts of my body (namely my chest) burned by the industrial iron, having my fingerprints seared off by freshly laundered tablecloths that seemed to come straight from the fire pits of Hell, and (most frequently) finding elaborate ways to avoid having to fold my Hebrew classmates’ underpants.

Anyway, my coworkers (the Women of the Wash), whom I hated and still hate with a fiery passion on account of which I am perfectly willing to go to Hell, would frequently sing along to the radio. And, this being Israel and the land of Ben Yehuda, obviously most of the songs were in English. And horribly dated. So, to them, the first two lines of “St. Elmo’s Fire” would, instead of “Growin' up / You don't see the writin' on the wall,” be a melodically daring interpretation of the lyrics “Gerrn op / You doesee a wraton a oll.” Or something. As the only native English speaker in the room, several months of nonsensical lyrics from a random assortment of 80s, 90s and occasionally medieval songs started to wear on me.

Finally I could bear it no longer. Neil Sedaka’s “Breakin’ Up Is Hard To Do” came on the radio, probably right after Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

 

And as I sat there folding yet another dishtowel, I decided I needed to show the Women of the Wash how it’s done. THIS is how we sing English, you kibbutznik bitches. So I went big. I sang along with Neil as loudly as I possibly could, hoping even the Jordanians could hear my crackling voice. They’d think to themselves, “Well, I can tell the lyrics are Sedaka, but the tune is unlike anything we’ve ever heard…” Who cares though--my musical ability wasn’t what I was trying to prove, but rather my ability to speak English. See how clearly I enunciate the lyrics? See how I indisputably know how each sound I sing fits within the boundaries of a coherent, English word? Enjoy the free English lesson in this one-woman concert, you rancid communists.

Anyway, my point is that with these two exceptions (and a few others over the years, like the time in senior year when I was driving a freshman to school, forgot she was in the car, and ended up performing a noisy duet with Elton John), I don’t sing.

Except when I’m by myself in the car. When I got back in my car on August 1, there was eight months of pent-up diva that needed to be released. I’ve since then driven hundreds of miles around LA, singing at the top of my lungs.

Car song of the moment?

 When I’m in the car, I feel like Fun. need my help. And I’m happy to oblige.

Now, it’s nearly midnight. Diva needs her sleep.

This one time I almost died in St Pancras

Okay, so the title might be a bit of an exaggeration. Let's back up a bit.

I took refuge in St Pancras.

Okay, again, a bit of an exaggeration. Basically I'd been walking around London for far too long, saw a church, and thought, "Ah, there's a place for a good sit." Because, and I think this is something people of all creeds can agree on, churches are great places for sitting. And, as an added bonus, sometimes they even have toilets.

Maybe that's why American tourists seem to always flock to churches in Europe. No, it's not our religiosity or our interest in European ecclesiastical history or even a penchant for fine architecture--it's just that we are a people used to having far more public toilets around. People frequently ask me, because apparently I'm the only American they've ever seen, what my biggest source of culture shock is. Can I finally admit it? Quite honestly I'm shocked by the lack of toilets. I'm not talking about in touristy areas, I'm talking about "real people" areas.

Anyway, you shouldn't have let me get onto the topic of toilets, because actually there's something else I really wanted to talk about.

So... I wandered into St Pancras. It had the feel of a hotel lobby, complete with some unseen person whose piano tinkerings gave me flashbacks to a childhood spent sitting in hotel lobbies around the world, waiting for that travel agent who went on family vacations with us (I seem to remember my brothers addressing her as "Mom") to come back from her tour of the luxury suites.

And then I saw the pews.

Box pews!!!!

The last time I saw pews like this I was a small child on a family vacation to New England. I remember standing in a church somewhere in Boston and seeing these boxes that families would sit in, and being in absolute awe. The height of the box, the size of the door, and the fact that a family would be shut into a box, all reminded me of a roller coaster car. At age nine, just as I was doing now at age 24, I imagined WASPs dressed in their Sunday best, throwing their hands in the air and screaming with fear and excitement as their pew went around a loop and into a corkscrew.

Well, 24 year old me couldn't help herself from living nine year old me's fantasy. I looked both ways (only a man on a piano and a woman praying in the corner) before dashing across the aisle to a particular pew that seemed to be waiting for me. Like a giddy idiot I slid into the pew and closed the door with a satisfying CLICK.

For a while I didn't even realize that I had violated some rule that probably got deleted from an early draft of the Chronicles of Narnia, something about not shutting pew doors shut unless you are absolutely certain how to open them back up. Instead I sat there imagining that I was on the roller coaster at the pier back home. Does that one even have doors? Who the hell cares. All I know is that I sat in this pew, trying to lean from side to side pretending to be on a roller coaster as quietly as possible so as not to disturb people in the church doing actual church things. I figured throwing my hands up and screaming, "WOOOOO!" would probably be frowned upon, so I made do with swaying slowly enough that the creaks of the wooden pew were hardly audible.

After a while I decided it was time for me to grow up and head out to the British Library, so I gathered my things together, pushed the pew door open, exited, and walked along the road.

Oh wait, no. That's not what happened.

Instead, I pushed on the pew door and absolutely nothing happened. I paused for about five seconds, hoping that in that time the pew door would sort itself out, and then I pushed again. Nothing. Again. Nope, still locked. Again? Nope. Nope. Nope. A horrifying realization then dawned on me, namely that I had no idea how to open the stall I had locked myself into. Basically my roller coaster fantasy had come to full fruition, and now I would have to wait for the ride operator to come release me. Except churches don't have ride operators.

At this point I let out a sigh and thought to myself, "Well, this is where I die." Because, let's face it, starving to death locked in a church pew is the preferable option to asking a priest/pastoral assistant/verger/parishioner/passing bishop to release me, an idiot who was pretending to be on a roller coaster in a church. I mean, there are worse ways to go. Just trying to look on the bright side here.

I briefly considered vaulting over the wall and hoping the man on the piano and the praying woman didn't see. Would I get arrested? Then again, is vaulting over a pew wall even an arrestable offence? Can the Church arrest people? Oh man, this is what happens when you let Jews into churches...we accidentally lock ourselves in.

Then I thought about hulking out of the pew. I've [accidentally] hulked out of a t-shirt before. Once. Could I do it with wood, too? Well, it was certainly worth a shot. I tried to think of things that pissed me off, and thoughts of the RE GCSE exam flooded my mind. I AM SO ANGRY ABOUT TEACHING TO THE EXAM...........................BUT WHY AM I NOT TURNING GREEN AND ENORMOUS???

Aw crap. Looks like I don't have the ability to hulk out of things at will. A disappointing discovery...

For a brief moment I looked down at my left hand, resting next to me on the bench. Just beyond the chewed nails and the faded notes to myself I caught sight of a little button. Now I was ready to cross over to the other side. I pushed the button and I was liberated!

I left St Pancras a changed woman. A woman who now realizes that even the hideous stack chairs at St Paul's Cathedral that look like something from a high school multi-purpose room, even these have hidden beauty and benefits. Specifically that they will not try to hold you hostage.

Footloose, Justin Timberlake, and Sam's Goodbyes

One of the most disappointing things about this year is the realization that I’m no less socially inept than when I started. After moving away from home to go to college, then moving away from college to go to Israel twice, then going home again, and then finally coming to England, I feel like I should be an expert in social interaction by now. After all, I’ve had to try to make new friends pretty much every nine months, much like professional surrogacy, minus payment/babies/giving birth/everything.
No, it doesn’t matter that I’ve had to meet an entire cast of new people and try to befriend them more often than some college boys wash their sheets—put me in a room filled with people, even people I now know, and I will still make strategic retreats to the restroom. Yes, if you’ve ever suspected me of going to the bathroom far too often, it all makes sense now.

Mostly when I retreat to the toilet I stand at the sink and think to myself, “Oh God, what if someone I don’t know particularly well tries to hug me?” Because, obviously, that would be the end of the world. Even worse, I panic about the prospect of people talking about boring things, simply because I think I’m physically incapable of pretending to be interested. And then everyone will think I’m horribly rude. No, much better that they think I have some kind of tragic bladder condition.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few days. Along with Footloose.

See, Footloose comes in because I’ve been a bit sad saying goodbye to yet another group of people I’ve surprisingly come to like. And for some reason listening to “Footloose” more times than I’d care to admit in a public forum has been my way of dealing with the sadness.

On the plus side I’ve forgotten about the number of “GOODBYE FOREVER!”s I’ve had to endure this week. The downside, however, is that I have realized something that destroys Footloose for me. As a completely shit dancer I find myself more confused by movies like Footloose than I do by the concept of the Trinity. Yes, Footloose. You are more confusing than the idea that God is both three and one. You are more confusing than flawed math.

See, how can teens in a town that for most of their lives had outlawed dancing still dance better than me, someone for whom dancing has always been legal and often encouraged? Either the premise of Footloose is flawed or my natural dancing abilities are so sub-par that I should seriously consider seeking advice from a medical professional.

Anyway, thoughts of my social crapness and dancing crapness led me to remember something I wrote back in Israel three years ago. Here it is, in edited and censored “glory”:

Tonight in a bar some Justin Timberlake song came on. I wish I could tell you the title, but I know it only as “that song that embarrasses the shit out of me.”

(Strangely enough, 24 year old me knows what the song is...)

Back in 9th grade, 14 year old me took a dance class at school. I wish I could make my dear loyal readers proud (all four of you…); I wish I could tell you that I’m a great dancer.

And, wish fulfilled, I’m going to tell you that I am indeed a great dancer. A fantastic dancer. 

In my room.

At home, by myself, I am the greatest dancer the world has ever seen. My moves range from the smooth to the silly to the obscene. The problem is that the second anyone else can see me, I can’t dance. I freeze up. I’m embarrassed to even tap my feet to the beat in public. People who might not know me as well would say that I don’t like dancing, based on how they see me freeze up in clubs or at dances. This is a lie. Secretly, deep down, I have to stop myself from jumping on tables and going all out when I hear music in public. Especially if it’s a Mika song. Maybe it’s because I’ve done lighting/stage managing for too many musicals, but I even find myself struggling to refrain from dancing to the PA music in seemingly innocent places, like on the bus or at a pizza parlor or at Aroma. Basically, I’m a closeted Breslover, except with a larger arsenal of dance moves involving my ass.

So anyway, I thought taking this dance class would teach me some basic stuff so that I wouldn’t totally freeze up when I’m around other people. I’d still probably never fulfill my (then) dream of breaking out into a song and dance number in the middle of the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but I figured that there was some kind of healthy compromise I could reach. I figured a Level One class would be filled with beginners, like me, who had never taken a class before and who knew nothing about dance.

Boy, was I an idiot. The people in that class…. Let me put it like this: it was like being in a Level One French class with only native Parisians.

“Beginning Dance” consisted of me, my two friends, and apparently the entire cast of the film “Center Stage.” And my two friends, those fucking traitors, turned out to be halfway decent.

I’ve blocked out most memories of that class from my head, but when I cringe in utter humiliation at the mere thought of being in a dance class as an awkward teenager, clear moments of extreme embarrassment come to the front of my mind. I remember doing an interpretive dance about the creation of the universe (complete with dialogue: “Expand…expand……revolve revolve revolve….wither….wither….wither……..apocalypse. The End.”) I remember doing an exercise with the entire class that involved leaping like graceful gazelle across the wild grasses of the Serengeti. Okay, that’s what it was supposed to look like, and somehow everyone else in the class actually managed to pull it off. I on the other hand managed to look like a polio-crippled elephant jumping up and down in frustration.

…

But the worst part by far was the Justin Timberlake dance. This was what the teacher really focused on. A dance to a Justin Timberlake song. Needless to say, I was terrible at it. For one thing, I couldn’t remember all the steps—sure, remembering long passages of epic Roman poetry in its original Latin was a cinch for me, but the second you try to get my feet to remember anything besides how to walk…well, you’re in for trouble. And even when I could remember the steps, I couldn’t pull them off. A lot of the moves involved trying to look, for lack of a better word, “sexy.” You know, for example, you can’t just move your ass from Point A to Point B in a straight, efficient line, but rather you gotta put some attitude into it. Or something. Don’t ask me, I’ve never really understood this stuff. 

Frankly, the mere thought of me trying to act sexy is appalling enough to turn even the straightest of men gay. As a favor to the general public …, I decided that the best thing I could do for the dance would be to do try to be as unsexy as possible. I tried imagining that I was dancing in a church. And also that I was a nun. I’m not sure which church would have played a Justin Timberlake song in the middle of services, but oh well. This is what got me through dance class.

So anyway, every time I hear that song, my head always goes back to 9th grade dance class. That song was the background to all those memories.

When it came on in the bar, I realized that the song would now also be the background to the memories of this night. This song is what I heard when I was interacting with people. 

It made me start comparing the two experiences. Here’s Justin Timberlake singing as I stumble my way through dance class way back when. And here’s Justin Timberlake singing as I interact with people in a bar setting. Justin Timberlake and Me, the dancer. Justin Timberlake and Me, the person interacting with other humans.

I gotta say, of the two ……I’m a much better dancer.

Double double toil and please just let me die now...

Oh man, I've been bitten by the theater bug. I offered to help with props/building/whatever with the local Passion Play, and a shortage of willing players has meant that I've since been upgraded to the status of actor, with an actual honest-to-goodness line. I flatter myself by thinking that the person who allowed me to take on this role thinks I can draw upon inner acting strength I didn't know I had to add meat to this one line, when in reality (as learned from this past Sunday's rehearsal) when I act--on a good day--I just sound like a quietly constipated version of my normal, dull self.

To be fair, I am enjoying myself and I'm happy to be part of it. But honestly it also brings back horrific memories of my time as a theater major at college. All I wanted to do was play with lights and use the occasional power tool, but my college thought that in order to be a good lighting designer I needed to know how to act.

All I remember about that class is that every day was humiliating agony. I still cringe at the thought of having to perform that witches thing from the beginning of Macbeth in front of everybody. I remember during rehearsals for it my partners would nag me to put more effort into it. Get into character, they'd tell me. Double double toil and trouble... And I'd just silently pray that either I or everyone else or both would die before the performance date, because the thought of enthusiastically crouching around an imaginary cauldron and speaking in verse seemed somehow even worse than simply shitting my pants both visibly and audibly while onstage.

It got to the point where 18 year old me considered drastic solutions. Whenever I had to perform in front of my class I would fantasize that while I was reciting my poem/monologue/whatever I was wearing an enormous inflatable penis costume. "Surely that'd embarrass you even more, Sam," you're probably saying. But the fact is that imagining I was wearing an enormous inflatable penis costume made the rest of the class seem ridiculous. Here I am, wearing an invisible inflatable penis costume in front of the entire class--and these dumbasses don't even realize it! I'm giving a serious monologue in my dull voice of indigestion and I'm NOT EVEN ACKNOWLEDGING THE FACT THAT I'M DRESSED AS A HUGE INFLATABLE PENIS! And you're taking me seriously! Who's the idiot now, guys? Oh, that's right, YOU!

Well, a girl can dream...

I eventually gave up on the whole theater major thing. It wasn't just the horrific acting classes, but also the crap jobs I had to do backstage. My personal favorite was "Lint Mistress," where my job was literally picking lint off the leading man.

As part of the costume crew I had to follow around the costume designer, a grad student who had such a strong Great Lakes accent that I thought her jaw was going to pop off at any minute from the vowel strain. On one memorable occasion I was called in to help her with the leading man's pants (TROUSERS!), so I followed her into a small dressing room where the three of us could be alone together. She decided that the leading man's pants needed to be expanded, so without any kind of warning she just tore this guy's pants open. So the guy was just standing there with a huge, gaping hole in the region of Ass, looking completely appalled. The costume designer had to hurry out of the room to get more pins, leaving me alone with this guy I don't know but who I regularly pick lint off of, now with him in underpants and pathetic tatters that were once pants. I remember trying to turn around to preserve some semblance of this guy's modesty, only to find that a mirror was behind me. So instead I just sort of stared off to the side while the leading man and I both grew increasingly red in the face as we both tried to pretend like he was not wearing shredded pants right now. He was a senior and I was a freshman, so he tried to break up the awkwardness of the situation by asking me how I was settling in. "Not very well at the moment," I wanted to tell him.

After about five eternities the costume designer finally returned to fix the pants, but by that point I was pretty convinced that theater was no longer for me. I needed order in this chaotic world. I needed to know that pants would not suddenly be ripped apart at any given moment without any kind of a warning.

The whole realization that theater was not the major for me made me think of Roland the Farter, or more importantly Le Petomane.

Le Petomane was a guy who farted professionally in the Victorian era, a guy who is sometimes referred to as a "fartiste." Apparently he used to do farting impressions of the San Francisco Earthquake, and he'd do animal sounds. This flatulist retired during World War I because he thought the world was too inhumane. Just as I only wanted to play with lights, he just wanted to fart. That's all he wanted.

And that, my friends, is beautiful.


(Speaking of theater, if you'd like to read a short scene about St Thomas a Becket that I wrote when I was 16, please click here)

Back in college

Back during my quick stint as a film major at college I had a really good looking professor. Staring at this man during class made all those hours of pretentious films that we had to watch allllll worth it. But as hot as he was, and as much as I dubbed Fridays "Hot Prof Day" because I had his class and another looker's class, this guy was a shit teacher.

Okay, maybe that's a bit unfair. Having gained a bit of teaching experience myself now, I have a lot more sympathy for him than I did back when I was 19. I realize now that sometimes students will make contributions in class for which all the best pedagogical theorists agree the only appropriate response is "What the fuck are you talking about?" And I also realize that sometimes kids will ask questions that I have to wonder what language they're speaking in. And frequently when you ask kids for an answer to a question they'll come up with some answer so horribly WRONG that only Satan himself could have planted it in the child's head.

So anyway, this professor would have us screen our short films in front of the class. My one and only film made as a film major was about a Jew getting so pissed off about Campus Crusade for Christ that he ends up leading an exodus to Skokie, IL. But you didn't really need to know that.

Anyway, after each film was screened the professor would flip on just one of the lights. There he'd stand, only half of him lit by a small pool of weak, orange light in an otherwise dark room, and he'd spout off awkward comments. Trying to express an interest in our beginners' work but clearly not sure how, he'd say things like, "Wow. So what was up with [*insert the worst part of a student's project*]?" He didn't say much, usually just one line, but the one line was without fail unintentionally awful. The sort of thing that would make you want to step outside, go up to the water outside, and slowly immerse yourself in Lake Michigan and never come up for air. Then, silently gloating over someone else's failure while also realizing that we were next, the audience of film students would sit in awkward stillness, someone would cough uncomfortably, another person would give a good ol' SNUUUUURF to remedy their runny nose caused by the Midwestern winter, and then the professor would ask us to put on the next film.

Repeat for each film.

Besides Professor HotStuff and his awkward comments though, there were a lot of other things to look forward to when it came to film class. And when I say a lot of other things I really just mean Penny*. Or maybe it was Penni. Or Peny? I don't know. Penny seems too normal for this girl, one of my dear film classmates. I remain fully convinced that she was a very nice person, but my God was she delightfully bizarre. Years from now when I'm old and gray and about to die alone in my house with my 500 cats (all of whom I will detest), I think her coats are what I will remember about this period of my life.

What I remember is that she would wear enormous fur coats. Like, MASSIVE fur coats. They were usually cut short, almost a bit like crop top fur coat. She had several different fur coats, but the one thing they all had in common was that they all made her look like a yeti. I always used to anticipate her arrival to class because she was one of those people who is physically incapable of arriving on time to anything, so every Friday she would waltz in about 20 minutes late like it ain't no thang, and she would disrobe. And off would come an absolutely ENORMOUS and unspeakably furry coat. And then it would take her another five minutes for the coat to be lovingly tucked into a vacant seat like it was not just an enormous collection of dead, fluffy animal skins but instead a pile of fluffy and inanimate puppies. I mean, I was a theatre/film major--I loved a good production, and this definitely counted.

I'm also convinced that she had some sort of a religious obligation to have at least 10 animals on her at any given moment, much like a Sikh's Five Ks. On one memorable occasion I watched her take off a gigantic light brown fur coat only to find that she was wearing a suede hippie-indian vest. With colorful embroidery. And which was lined with even more yeti fur.

I also liked the pillbox hats that she would wear. They were exactly like what Jackie Kennedy used to wear, except that Penny's had the same texture as latex. And they were metallic and neon. They looked a bit like what I would imagine we think hookers would have worn in the 1960s (regardless of how they may have actually dressed.


Anyway, that was my undergraduate experience. Just thought you should know.

.

Cheetos, Chariots and Chets.

On the journey to Hebrew School I often felt nauseated. Some of the nausea might have had something to do with the fact that I hated Hebrew School, but most of it had to do with the vile chariot that transported me there. Twice a week after regular school from the age of 9 until dropping out at 12 I was transported over hill and freeway overpass to my synagogue to learn Hebrew, and apparently the woman who drove me had religious objections to cleaning her car. And, mind you, this is a complaint coming from the individual who proudly (hell yeah!) didn’t wash her car for over a year and a half. Verily I tell you, the amount of crushed Cheetos in her seat cushions could have fed all of Minnesota for about five years, or at least they COULD have had they not been rotting. Hell, I didn’t even know Cheetos were capable of rotting since until that point I hadn’t been entirely convinced that they were actually made out of food.

Shit man, this journey to Hebrew School was so educational. There was more learning going on in the backseat of this car than goes on on The Learning Channel. You know what else goes bad that I didn’t know goes bad? Water. Did you know water has an expiry date? Well it does, and this woman had cases of water in her backseat, and all were expired. And they smelled RANK.

To top it off, I quite vividly remember finding a half-eaten moldy sandwich in that seatback pocket where (in normal cars) you would find crumpled maps, expired coupons and McDonald’s Happy Meal toys from the late 80s, and I feel like the armrest was some sort of a time/space vortex of rotten food, because every time I opened it I would find different horrifically expired food items. Though the food was different each week, it clearly hadn’t just been rotting since my peek last week. Let me try to explain that better: one week I’d open it up and see a black sandwich. The next week I’d open it up and see a cupcake with such intense mold that it HAD to have been rotting for longer than a week. Meaning, either some funky time hole thing involving the Doctor was going on where this was food from the future being transported back in moldy state or something, or this crazy bitch was INTENTIONALLY putting rotten food in her car. Then again, I think I’m the even crazier bitch for opening this armrest every week.

Again though, I’m not squeamish about a bit of mess or dirt involving food. If you ask me whether or not I have ever eaten from the floor a Skittle that someone had quite clearly stepped on, I will answer, “I plead the Fifth.” With that in mind, imagine the level of filth this car must have reached if it grossed even me out.

If you are retarded enough that I still have to explain that this car smelled like shit, you should probably stop reading and just go sit in the corner right now. No, accept it as a given that this car smelled like shit, but specifically it smelled like the taste you would get from eating chocolate and lemon together, and then having acid reflux. The worst part of all of it was when we would turn on the air conditioning (a necessity in LA!), and then directly into our poor, innocent faces it would spew out flavored air conditioning. Specifically, ass-flavored.

I don’t normally get carsick, but I used to get so sick from hurtling down the freeway in what smelled like the men’s bathroom at a curry restaurant. Even though I hated Hebrew School, once we arrived at our brick temple I would leap out of the car and run up the stairs, not giving one solitary shit that my school uniform skirt was flying up and flashing everyone in my desperate bid to get away from the Manky Mercedes. I’d pause in the hallway and try to steady myself, feeling as though if the teacher asked me to read a Chet (the “Khhhh” noise) then I would have no choice but to violently vomit over everyone.

Once the car-induced nausea wore down and I remembered that I was, once again and like every week, the only jackass(besides my brother) wearing a school uniform, the other kind of nausea would set in.

The Hokey Pokey Army

Again, too tired to actually write something new. There is a post in progress about how ridiculously unqualified I am to teach geography, but until then I hope you enjoy an EPICALLY LONG post from the past, written in 2009 while I was living in Israel and still in the process of dealing with the Israeli army:


Probably the worst thing about the army enlistment process (okay, army drafting process…) is the fact that at any given moment you have no idea what’s going on. I feel like most of the process involves being buffeted helplessly from station to station, from interview to interview, from test to test…it’s a bit like being Aeneas, except at the end of the process you don’t get to establish the foundations of Ancient Rome. You just get some boring two-year job.

What can you expect? You can expect, on several occasions, to get calls from random army human resources divisions (they’ll introduce themselves immediately after you say, “hello,” and they’ll speak so quickly that you have no idea what their name is or what division they work for). They’ll then quickly tell you that you have to be at X spot on Y date—they’ll say this information so quickly that it’s more like vomiting than speaking. You’ll ask specifically what it’s for, and you’ll get the same vague, generic answer: “It’s connected to your army placement.”

Well what the hell does that mean? The pee test I did in the army enlistment center was connected to my army placement, as was the mile I had to run at the combat gibush (*basically a combat audition), as were the computer tests I took at the jobnik test day. So how the hell am I supposed to prepare for this latest labor? Should I assume it’ll be a three-for-one test, and prepare to pee, run and test my brains all in the same day?

Today was one such mystery task “connected to my army placement.” All I knew was that I had to be in a specific building in a specific city at a specific time. And I was told, “God help you if you are late!”

So I got there about ten minutes before my scheduled appointment time. I rang a bell on a door, and after a few minutes a non-descript man answered the door. Really, the best way I can describe this guy is to say that there wasn’t anything about him worth describing. Bland features, bland voice….whatever. He ushered me into the waiting room and then told me that he would be with me in 30 minutes. So much for “God help you if you are late!”

And so I was left completely alone in this waiting room. Kind of freaked out and still not entirely sure what I was going to have to do at this latest army task, I cautiously made my way to one of 13 enormous chairs. I sat, completely alone in this absolutely gargantuan waiting room, filled with empty chairs, and started looking around. The walls were absolutely white—not just white, but a harsh white that, when combined with the harsh fluorescent lighting from the ceiling, made me feel like my eyes were about to shrivel up and die. “I’m melting! What a world, what a world….” It gave the room a sort of sterile, hospital-like feeling, minus the unsanitary fact that on each of the unoccupied chairs there were hairs and footprints and flakes of dead skin. This proof of the existence of other people in my shoes was both comforting and disgusting at the same time.

I settled down in my seat and tried to wait patiently. In complete silence. I swear, the color white makes a sound. So I’m sitting there, the walls are droning on in the background, saying, “WHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE.” And the air conditioning is humming, and the loudest thing in the room, drowning out the white walls and the AC, is my breathing. Deafening. It sounded like the breathing you hear in trailers for horror films. Like, “BREATHE…..Is the monster gone? BREATHE…..BREATHE…..Aaaaaaaa!!!!!!!” If that makes any sense.(If you’re still reading my blog that sort of thing MUST make sense to you.)

After about 10 minutes of complete boredom I got the idea that maybe sitting in this oppressively white, abandoned and bare room was in itself the test. I tried to slyly look for hidden camera, but after about five minutes of looking I realized that I’m probably not interesting enough to the army to be subjected to weird tests like this. So I made a mental note to not pick my nose, just in case, but stopped looking for hidden cameras.

I might just have to mention something really gross right now….when I get nervous, I pee. A lot. So obviously while waiting in this room it dawned on me that I needed to pee before going into my latest army task. Normally I’d ask permission to use a private office’s private bathroom, but in this case there was no one to ask. I was completely alone in this large waiting room. The exit door was locked, as was the door to what I figured was the main office. I turned a corner, passing through an extremely bare kitchen (just a sink and four small jars of coffee/cocoa powder—no spoons or even cups!), and came into a tiny toilet closet. I did my business, then flushed….and

WOOOOOOOSH

A deafening roar comes out of the toilet. Like, not a flush, but a noise that lets you know that you have done something irreversibly horrible to the toilet. The toilet growls, like it’s angry for revenge or something. I spend the next 10 minutes standing next to the screaming toilet, with my finger to my lips as I whisper, “Shhhhhh!” like it’s an upset baby instead of a toilet noisily demanding justice. I keep quietly repeating to myself, “All I did was pee! Shhhhh! Shhhh!”

Finally, over the angry growl of the toilet I heard the guy in charge start to come out of his office, so I rushed out to the waiting area to act as if I had been there the entire time. He doesn’t seem to notice the sonic boom coming out of the toilet…

Once inside the office (almost as bare as the waiting room—just a plain desk, two chairs, a telephone, a wilting plant, a pen, and a binder) , he asks me about some of my details. What is my name? What is my ID number? What is my phone number? I answer all these questions in my goofy Hebrew, and then he explains to me what this day is. It’s basically just another interview where he’s going to ask me about myself, and he’s going to ask about jobs in the army, and if there’s something I want to ask for I can do it now. And so the interview starts:

“Tell me about yourself.”

How the hell am I supposed to answer that? What does he want to know about me? Does he want facts about me? Like a biography or something? Does he want to know my philosophical beliefs? How detailed am I supposed to be?

Instead of answering, I just sort of cough and fidget uncomfortably, saying, “Ummmmm,” quite a bit, hoping that this will encourage him to follow up with a more specific question. But I get nothing. So then I said something like, “Look, I’m fine with telling you about anything, but I just don’t know what specifically you want to know.” This made the interviewer reflect for a moment, and then he issued a new demand:

“Okay. Tell me about school.”

Again I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and wondered what I was supposed to tell him. Did he want to know about my grades? What subjects I liked? My social life? My extracurricular activities? The various times I jumped out of windows or ran away from teachers?

But as I tried to form the right kind of answer in my head, I looked up at the interviewer. Big mistake.

This guy brought eye contact to a new level. This was not normal eye contact; this was a staring contest that the guy didn’t seem to realize I had already forfeited. I thought to myself that this must be what it’s like for Cyclops from X-Men to look at you without his protective glasses, that same intense burning sensation. I thought maybe he was trying to achieve some kind of telepathy with me, and I wanted to tell him, “Sir, no matter how hard you stare, you’re still not going to be able to read my mind.”

Anyway, somehow I got past the fact that apparently the interviewer didn’t need to blink like most humans do, and I found it a little bit easier to open up to his questions.

It did get really confusing though because I mentioned that I like to write stories about people I encounter. When he asked me to explain how I saw myself, how I would write about myself in one of these stories, and I said that I’m not all that exciting, I’m just an observer. He asked what I meant, and I said that I personally am quite boring, but my life just happens to intersect with the lives of interesting people, and I like to write about them. He asked for an example, and I brought up the Hokey Pokey Man.

The Hokey Pokey Man is a man that became sort of a legend of my childhood. I was a little girl, standing outside the White House with a school group, waiting to go inside for a tour. It was freezing, we had been waiting for what seemed like five years, and we were all miserable, when suddenly and completely out of the blue, we hear a loud voice singing the Hokey Pokey. We all looked around for the source of this sound, and down the street we found him. The Hokey Pokey Man. A man who dressed 100% like the respectable businessman or lawyer or whatever that he was, but who also wore enormous, bright yellow DJ headphones. I could say he was running down the street, but I think the word “prancing” would be more fitting. So this man pranced down the street in his sharp business suit, belting the Hokey Pokey at the top of his lungs, and flinging his arms into the air in time with the music. As all eyes waiting in line at the White House turned towards the Hokey Pokey Man, he seemed to be completely oblivious….still skipping and twirling down the street in his immaculately kept business suit and singing and dancing to the Hokey Pokey. And off he danced into the distance, like some kind of flamboyantly gay cowboy riding off into the rhinestone sunset.

The interviewer asked me how this story shows how I am, and I explained my telling him this story in itself is telling him about myself. While my classmates may only vaguely remember the Hokey Pokey Man, I’m the only one who is going to keep telling the story, who’s going to write about it, and who is going to spend great chunks of time for the rest of her life wondering what ever became of him, wondering if he’s still dancing the Hokey Pokey down the street in DC or if he’s made to a different state or different song by now.

This one time, this dude totally fell asleep in intro to hinduism

At some point we’re going to need a serious post about the fact that a member of staff just casually dropped an anti-Semitic remark like it ain’t no thang. I am, however, feeling a little ill (I wish I could claim that the shock of the remark on my Jew-soul gave me this cold, but unfortunately I’ve been sick for a couple days now), so instead I give you an edited version of a previous bit of writing I did.

I thought about it yesterday when I fell asleep during a lecture. In a normal lecture with the about 180 members of my program this wouldn’t be such a big deal, but this particular lecture was with 18 students only. When I woke up I thought maybe I’d gotten away with it, but when I made eye-contact with the lecturer she gave me a pretty undeniable glare.

With that I give you: THIS ONE TIME THIS DUDE TOTALLY FELL ASLEEP IN INTRO TO HINDUISM



Today during lecture--given by an Italian guy that I like to think of as Professor Mario Brothers--I noticed that my neighbor had fallen asleep on the shoulder of his other neighbor. She seemed slightly annoyed by it, but they were acquaintances so she wasn't too upset by it. I laughed, thankful for myself and amused at someone else's misfortune. I also liked that we were in the second row, the Splash Zone if you will, since you're so close to the professor that if he spits when he talks you will get wet. It's like the first few rows at Sea World or a Gallagher performance. Anyway, if you ask me (and you are asking me because this is my blog), to fall asleep within any professor's Splash Zone takes chutzpa to a new level. Instead of discretely dozing off in the back few rows of a huge lecture hall where the professor's weak eyes won't notice your closed ones, you choose to position yourself close enough to the professor that his lapel microphone can pick up your snoring.

Anyway, after a lengthy mental digression, my thoughts returned to the subject of the lecture. Well, actually my thoughts returned to their normal subject during that class--noting which words the professor has trouble pronouncing. But then something horrible happened. I sensed my neighbor shift in his seat. And then, horror of horrors, I noticed his head sleepily traveling from his other neighbor's shoulder towards me.

For any stranger reading this blog, you have to understand that I don't like being touched. It's not about germaphobia....I don't know if I have OCD or if I'm just weird, all I know is that I don't like being hugged, I don't even like handshakes, and I just generally do not like people who get too close to me. I usually make a genuine effort to forget about this problem when I'm around friends and family, but even with my own brother I would get very upset when he would fall asleep on my shoulder during car trips. So you can imagine how horrifying it was to see a stranger's head approaching and looking to do that very thing.

In fact, here's the theme from Jaws to provide a soundtrack for what I'll write next:


And so his head slowly advanced towards my shoulder. No no no, I prayed silently, please dear God....Buddha....Jesus....Krishna....whoever. Please for the love of all that is holy do not let him reach my shoulder. But my prayers fell on deaf ears. I had to come up with an escape and quickly, because I only had seconds left before his head made contact with my shoulder. Realizing that I was sitting in an aisle seat, I figured I could just lean out of my seat towards the aisle. Surely his head would stop its journey eventually, and I could just sort of huddle in my corner. And so I leaned out....and his head kept coming. So I leaned out more.....and his head kept coming. Eventually it got to the point where I was leaning so far out over my armrest that I resembled a damp towel on a clothesline....or like a fat, dead fish just kind of flopped out, with my fat bulging over the sides of the armrest. This was as far as I could go without flipping over my armrest. And trust me, I considered it. I wasn't sure if the armrest could hold my fat, but I just held on and prayed that the advancing head would stop.

But it didn't. The head finally landed on my shoulder. Actually at this point, because of my sort of weird crouched/reclined posture it landed on my hip/arm. But whatever, all that matters was that a stranger was now sleeping on me. There were a few minutes where I silently thought about what to do, if I had to wake him up or if I would just have to suffer through class, when suddenly and completely involuntarily my body, as if deciding to take matters into its own hands, just had a spasm. It was the sort of spasm that wasn't dramatic enough for the people around me to notice, but it was strong enough to wake up Sleeping Beauty, who suddenly bolted upright, snorted and said something like, "Huh? What?"

And then about two seconds later he had conked out once more. Thankfully he didn't use my shoulder as a pillow again, but I kept a wary eye on him for the rest of class just in case. It became apparent, however, that this guy was incapable of sleeping without a shoulder-pillow, because for the rest of class he would sort of doze off....his head would sort of drift backwards...and then BOOM! His whole body would seize--like literally the whole body would seize, and his arms and head would flail around--and he'd sit upright, completely startled and awake. And then within a few seconds the process would repeat itself. I spent a few minutes watching his cycle of falling asleep, then suddenly completely spazzing out, trying to stay awake, and falling asleep again, and I imagined he was probably thinking to himself, ZzzzZzzZzzzz *SNORT!* HUH??? Where am I? Oh shit, was I sleeping in class? Okay, I can't fall asleep again, I gotta stay awake....but....but maybe it'll help me concentrate if I just sorta tilt my head back and....zzZzzZzzzzZZZzzzz."

While this cycle took a few minutes for each revolution during the beginning of class, by the end of class it was happening every couple of seconds. Honestly, I even entertained the thought that he was having a seizure. But once I realized that he was indeed still just falling asleep and waking up repeatedly, I started laughing. In the middle of lecture. Which was about burning widows on pyres in Hinduism.

I looked around me and realized that no one in this 100 person lecture even noticed the guy who was having what looked like seizures every couple of seconds. If you ask me, not noticing stuff like that is a waste of coming to lecture.

/

The Fiiiinaaaaall COUNTDOWN

Yesterday the song “The Final Countdown” came up on my iPod, and I immediately thought of my brother.


Before I continue, please get this video going. And turn up your speakers. Turn them up as loud as they will go.

My brother’s 14 months older than me, and when we were in 11th and 12th grade (Year 12 and 13) we had finally reached the age when having a sibling so close in age finally stops sucking so much. Instead of acting like total little bitches and tattling on each other from the backseat, now we were old enough to peaceably have the car to ourselves, and we were in total agreement about one thing in particular—every single afternoon, as soon as we started to pull out of the school parking lot, “The Final Countdown” had to be blasted.

I almost mean “blasted” in the literal sense. The force of the music beating out from the speakers felt like hundreds of small explosions, to the point where we would roll down the windows for fear that the sheer force of the volume would blow them all out, and the bass would rumble out with the intensity that jostles your internal organs out of place. I’m pretty sure that this daily ritual is entirely responsible for any hearing loss I may currently be suffering from. Hell, even if I ever get cancer I’m sure that it’d be somehow directly linked to this epically loud music.

I don’t really have a point in sharing all of this. Well, I guess my point is that I’m feeling a little nostalgic. It felt strange—and a little fantastic--to think that I’m studying to be a teacher and living in an Anglican seminary in England while he’s studying in a Lubavitch rabbinical school in the US, and I had to wonder how the hell we got to those places from that car blasting “The Final Countdown” in a high school parking lot in Los Angeles.