My Musings
Email me if you wish. Sunday, April 25, 2010I quit my new blog, and now I have a new new blog. Catch it here:Updates every Saturday.
.: posted by Boris 1:44 AMWednesday, June 14, 2006Go to My Other Blog!My new blog is here. I update it every day, so if the thing you disliked most about this blog was the infrequency of updates, you will be pleased. Note that the new blog is quite different, however... This blog was great fun for me when I first started because I wrote it for myself. Then people told me I was funny, and I started writing to be funny rather than to have fun. Once I fell into that trap, the blog spluttered and stopped for another few years but was never the same. Writing for yourself is fun, and so you do it; writing for other people is not, and so you don't. That's why updating became a chore, and why I did it so rarely, and why I had to MAKE myself do it when I did. Entries in the new blog are generally very short: the longest ones are just a few paragraphs. In this first blog, I would be embarrassed to post an entry shorter than two pages; now I don't care if an entry is one sentence (though I do make sure it's a good sentence). Some people think my new blog is terrible, and miss the old one. If you discover that the new blog isn't for you, I'm sorry. It's for me. .: posted by Boris 2:41 AMTuesday, October 11, 2005A New Link!For those of you who are sick and tired of waiting for me to update my blog, you can give Stephen's a shot. It's the link called "Tacky Rude and Vulgar," up above in my links section. If you don't think a blog with a title like that is a surefire hit for quality humor, then ... you probably have good taste. But otherwise, give it a read. .: posted by Boris 11:31 AMSunday, September 25, 2005CoincidencesWhen I was ten or so, my dad once gave me a lecture about the inner workings of a toilet. Nevertheless he claims he loves me, and so does my mom, so once or twice a semester they visit me at college. They bring me food and take me out to eat and listen to me gripe about the cafeteria. (Try subsisting on a quasi-digestible mixture of grease and salt for a while and see how it affects YOUR conversation habits.) Then they weep mournfully as they come to terms, yet again, with what a bore their son has turned out to be, and thus a Saturday is lost to them forever. My mom is wonderful because I tell her to bring a few choice culinary items (Pringles, Easy Mac) and she brings me the Snack aisle of the supermarket stuffed in a suitcase. My parents are great. Without them, I would starve. Coincidence #1: My parents visited me yesterday. So did Regina’s. Coincidence #2: Walking down the street after lunch, my parents and I ran into Regina and her parents. We were killing time before our play began, and so were they. My parents and Regina’s had never been formally introduced, but they’re all Russian so they got along famously. We chatted for a while and parted ways. I convinced my parents to go to the mall, where my dad, still probably suffering a little guilt over the toilet lecture, bought me a board game. My mom bought ridiculously expensive and unnecessary crap, but my dad and I know better than to challenge the utility of her purchases. Men fly like leaves in the wind before the awesome might of a woman’s iron logic. (“Ilana, you have sixteen pairs of pants. Why did you buy another?” “DUUUUHHHHH! Look at the TAG! They normally cost seventy-eight dollars, but I got them on sale for seventy!”) In retrospect, one might have predicted that something titled “Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure” would be pretty awful. It wasn’t even a play: it was Dave Gorman himself, talking about an unusual eight weeks of his life. He was British and his story had some amusing parts, but unfortunately the parts that weren’t amusing were serious, and it was during these that Dave often chose to forgo speaking for yelling, and the sound system was set up such that his yelling had the effect on me as though a 322-pound lumberjack named Huey was attempting to reorganize the molecules of my eardrums with an ice pick. A “Googlewhack” is when you type two words into Google — no quotes — and only one hit shows up. Dave’s story begins when he is procrastinating on a novel. Someone sends him an email informing him that he is a Googlewhack (that is, someone found a Googlewhack and his website was the one hit), whereupon Dave finds a Googlewhack himself and emails that person, and that person finds the next Googlewhack, and so on; and then Dave ends up flying all over the world in an effort to meet ten Googlewhacks. It’s a lot more complicated than that, as you will see if ever you hate yourself enough to watch this woeful “play,” but that’s the gist, and if nothing else it’s a remarkable story about the dangers of procrastination. From what I could tell, Dave never did get started on that novel, and instead wrote a book about this Googlewhacking shit. Just a tip: if you ever meet a bearded British fellow named Dave Gorman, forget about tact and rudeness for a moment and run away immediately. He is not stable. When he said at the end of the “play” that he’d be hanging out at the bar if anybody wanted to chat, I fled the theater on legs that could have overrun a cheetah. And yes, it is possible to find Googlewhacks. I could give you some examples from the “play,” but unfortunately they aren’t Googlewhacks anymore, because of Dave’s book and the mysterious popularity of his show. My favorite is one that Dave found himself, and the one that got him started on his quest: dork turnspit. If you try to find any Googlewhacks yourself, you will quickly realize how remarkable it is that two such ordinary words could be a winner. I ultimately had to resort to intersexed fascinum. See if you can find one that makes do with simpler vocabulary. Of course, I can’t complain too much about the Googlewhacking, because the alternative, which Regina saw, was “Menopause: the Musical.” As a male, I can imagine nothing more terrible than sitting in a theater for two hours and watching a production that concerns itself entirely with music. I hate musicals. Every musical ever made, however good, would have been better without music and should have been written as a play, except for Gigi, which was just so awful it should never have been made into anything, and we ought to exhume the corpse of its creator and burn it to ensure she doesn’t inflict any more harm upon the universe, as well as the corpses of all the actors who played on opening night (just to be safe). If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. Try tacking on “the Musical” to any random movie you can think of — say, The Terminator, so now we have, “Terminator: the Musical” — and observe what happens: Someday, I’ll be back, maybe. Until then, Hasta la Vista, Baby. It just doesn’t work. If it was “Menopause: the Play,” I might have actually wanted to go see it. My mom — who is young, beautiful, wise, intelligent, and also might be reading this — has not had menopause yet, and I happily won’t be anywhere near her when she does; I can only suppose its effects on her will be staggeringly frightful. Yesterday, for instance, there was loud music playing in the theater, and five minutes before the play was due to start, my mom complained to the house manager that she didn’t like the music. Instead of, you know, moving a few rows back. Throw in menopause, and I conjecture she would have burst into tears before ripping the speakers out of the wall with her teeth. A play about such women, I think, would have been delightfully amusing. Coincidence #3: We had a 7:30 reservation at a Japanese restaurant for dinner, and when we walked in, we saw, for the second time that day, Herman Melville. Who had been reincarnated and come back to life in the form of Regina and her parents. My parents and I had been to this restaurant several times before, but we went again because 1) it’s good, and 2) there aren’t many restaurants you can go to in Cleveland. I mean, you can go to them, but you won’t be able to get back. For those of you who are from Columbus and erroneously believe that Cleveland is approximately the same thing, let me clear things up. In Columbus, roads generally follow what are termed “straight lines,” and intersect each other at so-called “ninety-degree angles.” In Cleveland, however, almost all the roads are arcs, and the typical intersection consists of eight or nine of them. This setup makes following even Mapquest directions difficult, because in addition to ordinary commands like “left” and “right,” you must deal with gradations: slight left, gradual left, middling left, Post-Modern left, and so on. Mess one up and you’re in Iowa. But even worse than the confusing directions is the gap between directions. In Columbus, you just “go straight” until the next instruction. In Cleveland, you “stay on the same road,” which may seem like just another synonym of “go straight” until you realize that “staying on the same road” in Cleveland for as little as a hundred feet can involve any number of U-turns, 180s, gradual lefts, tangential lefts, Neo-Classical rights, and so on. The arcing roads intersect at such small angles that going straight at any intersection is almost guaranteed to get you off your current road and into Iowa. Let me illustrate. A typical driving scenario in Columbus might be, “Turn right on Barkley, 2.0 miles,” and so you turn right on Barkley and go straight for two miles and then follow the next instruction. A typical driving scenario in Cleveland might be, “Turn slight right on Oatfield, 2.0 miles,” and so you turn what you hope is a slight right onto what you hope is Oatfield, but you’re not sure if it was slight enough (or too slight), but you don’t have time to think about that now because here all of a sudden is a six-street intersection and you can go ten different directions, “straight” being none of them, and is the road curving left or right, and is it fifteen degrees or twenty, or dang, 17.5 is also looking like it might be the one, and you’re driving thirty-five miles an hour so you have maybe half a second to decide. Boom, Iowa. It goes without saying that in Cleveland there are no street signs. Anywhere. You never even realize that you’re lost until you are in Iowa. Basically, do any substantial driving in Cleveland, and you’re in Iowa. My parents and I have been to Iowa many times, and never on purpose. The only way to avoid this problem is to not drive very far, but unfortunately, that means the only dining option we have is Coventry, a rather seedy shopping district full of cramped shops that sell used videogames and miscellaneous odds and ends like books titled Everybody Poops. Pacific East, amazingly, is a great restaurant and I don’t know what the hell it’s doing in that area, and so I guess it isn’t too surprising that two sushi-loving families would both select it. The point being, we got a big table together and made fun of Regina for being the only person who ate chicken instead of sushi. Chicken! At a Japanese restaurant! And this coming from the big Japanese buff, who likes Anime and video games and…uh, what else are the Japanese good for? Well, watching Anime in the original Japanese (with subtitles) is enough to label someone a Japanese culture buff in my book, so I was nothing short of appalled when Regina ordered chicken. Yes, I learned a very important lesson that day, as I dipped my yellowtail roll into the soy sauce and Regina futzed with her pathetic chicken, and that was this: although some people may appear to be one thing and you think of them in a certain way, when you really get down to it, when you start to think a little deeper about the things that truly count, you realize that despite all outward appearances, I still hadn’t asked Regina about Coincidence #4: Matt my suitemate, who plays D&D on Saturdays, and Matt the guy who is the DM (Dungeon Master) for Regina’s Saturday D&D sessions, are in fact the same person. And don’t ask me how I know what DM stands for. It’s common knowledge, all right! Regina first proposed the idea in an email that morning, but I wrote it off as impossible because I knew that Matt was merely a player in his group, not the DM. Nevertheless, curiosity prevailed and Regina and I attempted to discern over dinner whether my Matt and her Matt were one person. I plied Regina with details about my Matt’s personality, but she told me that she didn’t actually know very much about her Matt — apparently, the bonds between D&D players are not as deep as I had thought. (Regina explained to me that she didn’t necessarily know any of her fellow players very well, but that she knew their characters intimately. I pounded my forehead with my palm and cried a little bit before continuing with the conversation.) Next we tried to give each other a detailed physical description of our Matts. It turned out we were both incompetent. All I could say about my Matt was that he was roughly six feet tall, shaven, and round-faced. Regina said that she was 5’1” and therefore everybody looked six feet to her, but that her Matt was shaven and had blondish hair. Even though I lived with Matt for two years, I have no idea what his hair color is. When it comes to hair color, I won’t remember it unless it’s green or on fire. So all we had to go on was that Matt was shaven and didn’t wear glasses — which actually rules out a lot more men at this school than you might think — but we still weren’t absolutely sure. Next I asked Regina if there was a guy named Ethan in her group, because Ethan is the DM for Matt’s games. She said, “Well, we were supposed to have an Ethan — we’re actually playing Ethan’s world — but he got really addicted to World of Warcraft…” and I knew it couldn’t be anybody else. Incidentally, there was a D&D session that very evening, so after my parents drove away I dropped by Clarke to pay Matt a visit on the tenth floor, which the D&D gaming group unofficially takes over every Saturday. Ten or so people sat around a big square table, dice and character sheets at the ready. Matt was surprised to see me, so I filled him in on the amazing coincidence and chatted with him about Ethan’s recent gaming addiction. The guy sitting on Matt’s right, a somewhat chubby fellow with a round, stubbly face, had just completed a Mayan-style step pyramid out of dice. Sporting a 4x4 base, it was a fairly impressive structure. The kid to Matt’s left was enjoying the company of his gaming friends by sitting with his eyeballs buried in a laptop. He turned his head just long enough to see that the Builder had recently finished a monster project, and congratulated his friend on this remarkable achievement by chucking a fancy many-sided die at it. The athletic throw belied his pale skin and hefty glasses, and a delicious *KRAK!* sent a mountain of brown dice raining to the floor, where they blended nicely with the dark threads of the carpet. “Find ALL of them.” Apparently they were Matt’s dice. “Or you’re going to pay for it.” “But it wasn’t my fault,” the Builder whimpered. “Pick them up. You’re the one who built the pyramid,” Matt said. “My building it is not to blame for its subsequent destruction,” the Builder said, but he bent down anyway and started looking for the dice. After some time and much grumbling, he found most of the dice and heaped them in a gigantic pile on the table. There were enough dice in that pile to power every single one of my board games and still have enough left over to erect a small igloo. Matt looked up from his pages and glanced at the heaping mound of dice. It took him a quarter of a second to note, “You’re missing one.” The last die, it turned out, was buried in a dark crevice under a propped-up organic chemistry textbook lying on the ground. Fishing out the die, the Builder said, “I hate O-chem,” and I wasn’t sure if that was because it was a hard subject, or because its textbook had hidden one of the precious dice. The villain was absorbed once more in his computer. Matt seemed ready to start the session, so I bade him goodbye and wished him luck on his campaign. Dungeons & Dragons, for all its weirdness and creepiness, is a game I’ve always had a dark craving to try. It IS a board game, after all, and I like board games, and D&D is supposed to be pretty good. Sure, sometimes people use D&D to hold satanic rituals or dress up like vampires, but the game itself is supposed to just be about going around and killing stuff, which sounds like nothing if not the perfect game. I thought about asking Matt if I could join, but his group already had a lot of people in it, and they were in the middle of a scenario, and if I joined I would be new and they’d have to explain stuff to me, and I didn’t see any extra chairs, and the table space was kind of limited too, and I didn’t know if they could spare any character sheets, and my horoscope said not to try anything new that day, and many other reasons, so I couldn’t ask. Earlier, Regina had essentially made it painfully clear that my request would be well received if I would only make it, but when the big moment came, doubt seeped into my mind and my tongue suddenly failed to work itself up to the challenge. Playing D&D is kind of like eating food at somebody else’s house: you really want to do it, but you don’t feel comfortable unless the host practically forces you. So I didn’t ask if I could play, and I guess that means the coincidences didn’t amount to much. My mouth was already open, though, so I said goodbye again and walked back to the elevator. .: posted by Boris 11:07 PMFriday, September 09, 2005Another Blog PollAnother petty argument, this time with Andy. So leave chessmen15 a message and tell me: which video is more idiotic, this one or this one? I must admit that the humor content in both of them is rather lacking. It is clear, however, that whoever made the hobbit video actually has TALENT. Taking dialogue clips from an actual movie and fitting them to music like that is no simple task. Whereas the Kenya thing is just plain garbage. Remember, you're voting on which one is MORE idiotic! .: posted by Boris 9:45 PMFriday, September 02, 2005On the Way to a Game of FoursquareMatt: "I'm really glad you got a new ball; the old one was lopsided." Kevin: "What are you talking about? The other ball was fine." Matt: "It was lopsided." Kevin: "Matt, balls can't be lopsided. They're full of air, and there's no such thing as lopsided air." Matt: "The ball can still be lopsided if the outside of it caves in." Kevin: "No it can't! If the skin caves in, the ball will simply shrink. A ball can get bigger or smaller, but the air is evenly distributed and so it can never get lopsided." [argument continues in this vein until Matt gets tired of arguing and says:] Matt: "The fact is, I've seen lopsided balls and I played with them!" Matt initially responded to our uproarious laughter by kicking Kevin repeatedly in the shins. When he realized that this course of action wasn't stopping us from giggling like hyperactive schoolgirls, Matt stalked off to his room and locked the door behind him. We never did play foursquare. .: posted by Boris 11:31 PMSaturday, August 06, 2005Girls: Do They Have Any Taste in Girls?This evening I got into a really pathetic argument with Yana. She was engaged in the highly noble and admirable pastime of ogling online photos of a hot chick she's never met. I naturally became excited and demanded links. The girl was indeed pretty, but I couldn't resist showing Yana some photos of a girl I thought I was even prettier. Yana disagreed. We began a petty quarrel. Please, therefore, leave me an IM (chessmen15) telling me who you think is prettier: the girl pictured here and here or the girl pictured in the middle there and on the right there. Remember, Shift + click opens links in a new window, which might be handy. And before you say it, yes, I am a sad pathetic disgusting no-life wretched loser. Just vote please. .: posted by Boris 10:25 PMThursday, June 23, 2005Java Can DieThere was only one point in my life when I hated math. That was in calc 3, when we got to triple integrals. Regular integrals back in calc 1 were great; double integrals in calc 3 I could handle; but it's that third integral that got me. I wanted to burn math. Right now I'm having a similar experience with programming. My dad's random friend somewhere asked me to write a simple program, the one catch being that the program has to be in Java. I could write the program in .2 seconds in C++, but in Java I can't even correctly manage the part where you ask the user for the name of the file and the user types it in and hits enter and you store the name in a variable. I tried everything: reading the textbook, ripping code from online tutorials, bathing my cat in cow organs, but nothing works. And now I want to burn computer science. Please, may I never have an experience that makes me want to burn writing. .: posted by Boris 12:54 AMThursday, May 19, 2005[Do you ever look through your "blog" folder and find weird things you don't ever remember having written? And then post them in your blog anyway, even though they were written a year ago and no longer bear any relevance? Me too.]The Toilet Paper Here at Case, there is a “publication” called The Toilet Paper. Basically, the Toilet Paper is a page-long, humorous, fake-newspaper thing that a handful of kids print out periodically and then tape to the inside of toilet stalls. Last night I was alone in the bathroom, getting ready to brush my teeth. Well, not quite alone — the door to one of the stalls was closed, with somebody (I assumed) inside. You can fill in the rest. I was squeezing toothpaste onto my brush when the stall door opened and Kevin emerged, saying, “That was crappy.” “What?” I asked, struck by the irony of somebody using the adjective “crappy” after exiting a toilet. “Back there,” Kevin replied. I looked. He was pointing to the stall from which he had just arrived. Now I got scared. My eyebrows involuntarily shot up in alarm as I desperately tried to figure out what on Earth Kevin, who had but seconds ago finished using a toilet, could possibly have experienced in recent memory that might be described as “crappy,” other than an unpleasant bowel movement. Was he really going to tell me about it? I wanted to run, but the grip of shock and a toothbrush in my mouth held me firmly in place. “That…Toilet Paper…thingy. It sucked,” Kevin replied. Relieved that Kevin was not going to tell me about his defecation disasters, I made some comment about how it’s hard to be consistently funny, which Kevin didn’t understand at all because I had toothpaste in my mouth. So I repeated myself, except I don’t think Kevin understood it the second time, either, and then he turned on the noisy hand dryer to discourage me from further speech. Then he left. .: posted by Boris 6:48 PMMonday, May 16, 2005InsteadI have decided not to finish the Israel story, because it's not all that exciting, and because almost a year has passed since the actual trip and I've forgotten nearly everything. I now possess great admiration for people who go places and then write about it, because I can never seem to get it done. As far as this blog goes: NO MORE WRITING ABOUT VACATIONS! Instead I offer some quotes from the professors I had this semester. Systems Programming: -- "What's the format of the test?" "Well, we're gonna have some problems." -- "We assume if it works on the test data, it works on everything." Milton: -- "In the middle of an orgasm, nobody's talking in iambic pentameter." -- "Today, you can all go to hell." -- "I've gotta stop giggling. It's the drugs." AI: -- "By the way, the use of global variables is highly encouraged to ease programming." [Sorry, there were more, but I accidentally threw away my AI notes :(] Econ: -- "Now, potentially I would have had more fun doing my homework than watching Queen Latifah do anything." -- "I ... AM the pretzel king." -- "This is like, you never thought you'd need it, but a twelve-foot ruler would be really handy right about now." -- "There's nothing I like more than staying up three nights in a row and then going on a long, boring drive through the country." -- "Nobody steals '88 [Chevy] Novas. Because of their superior anti-theft mechanisms, obviously." English Lit: -- "I've done three co-ghost-written stories about very interesting Tibetans." -- "It was the most explicit sexual description I have ever read. And I have read a lot of them." -- "Who doesn't love necrophilia?" -- "In fact, you may be bullshitting me, but it's okay." -- "Can you imagine being in such a state of sexual arousal that a well-turned table leg would turn you on?" And the best one of them all: "If you got a great Dane, would you name him Hamlet?" .: posted by Boris 9:29 PMMonday, January 03, 2005Israel, Part...What Part Are We On? Five? No, FourI neglected to mention this before, so I think I’ll mention it now, since I’ve already given up all pretense of maintaining chronological order: Yana is extremely tall. Like, almost as tall as me, and I’m almost six feet, which isn’t anything special for a guy but pretty huge for a girl. Thankfully most of the activities on the trip discouraged high heels, or else Yana would have definitely towered over me and I would have felt horribly insecure. Strangely, Yana seemed to be ashamed of her height, and I was eternally amused. There’s one picture where she and Marina are standing next to each other with their backs to a rock wall; in it Yana is slouching so severely that if the photographer hadn’t caught her legs shooting WAY the heck off to the side, not the keenest observer could have told by looking at the picture that one of the girls is at least nine inches taller than the other. Yana later told me she had a picture with Marina where she didn’t slouch, the end result being that she looked like Shaquille O’Neal standing next to a midget five year-old. She cut that picture up, burned it, and fed the ashes to her lizard, despite my wailing, tearful protests. Tuesday night a guy named Neil Lazarus came to speak to us about the political situation in Israel and the Middle East. As you may well surmise, said political situation is not a particularly happy or uplifting subject to dwell on for an hour, but Neil handily got around that sour point by not actually talking about the political situation, and instead cracking an endless stream of jokes; and at one point, making us stand up and give shoulder rubs to each other. From the little that Neil did speak on the depressing matter during the occasional pauses between one-liners, I got the impression that affairs in Israel and the Middle East are: very bad. One of Neil’s keenest and most insightful points was that when Israelis say the word “peace,” it sounds like “piss.” Numerous potty jokes ensue: “We want piss in the Middle East,” etc. After Neil’s speech, everyone was in a gloomy, contemplative mood, so we all dressed up and went to the disco to get smashed and dance. I don’t know what strings were pulled or sexual favors performed, but somehow Shabbat & Crew managed at the last minute to rent us a discotheque for a few hours — just us, a bartender, and a hot bartender. The itinerary says we were supposed to have a bonfire that night, but I’m pretty sure we ended up having it some other night. Or maybe we snuck it in there somehow. Anyway the bonfire, whenever it happened, wasn’t too exciting. We talked, cooked potatoes, roasted marshmallows, and chilled in front of the fire, but the meat of the evening lay in singing popular Jewish songs; and when we ran out of those, singing unpopular Jewish songs that nobody but one person in the group had ever heard of; and when we ran out of those, singing pop songs; and ever since then the United Nations has been in session heatedly debating which of the three was most torturous. Also I had to pee really bad and ended up going in the woods. Sometime after I had returned to the fire, I talked to Ben, a cool guy who Yana wouldn’t admit to having a monster crush on, even though she clearly did, and I think he wanted her too, so there’s a brilliant opportunity lost forever to the whirling sandstorm of time; and Ben said he had to pee as well, so we had a really intellectual conversation. “Just go over there,” I said, pointing in the direction of the vast, empty woods. “It’s far away from everybody. That’s where I went.” “Yes, but if I go over there, I might step in your urinal.” By far the highlight of the evening. Anyway, the disco. There was a nice patio area perfect for puking and escaping the loud music. Inside the club itself there were three rooms. The room to the right had a dance floor and sound equipment, well-stocked with hideously loud speakers and an overflowing repertoire of terrible music. The room to the left had benches along the outer wall, plus plush red curtains with which two (or more) lusty patrons could shield themselves from prying eyes whilst making sweet love. The middle room was simply a bar. Quickly after our arrival, the music was pumped up to a volume that directly interfered with my heretofore formidable will to live. To talk to anyone you pretty much had to scream right into their eyeballs; I don’t know how people are supposed to be social at these things. For a little while I stood around idly, feeling terribly underdressed and wondering why my female comrades, who were elegantly dressed and looked very pretty, were willing to be seen with me. I should probably add that the drinking age in Israel is 18. Actually, just about every other country in the known universe except for the United States has a drinking age of 18. Ours is set at 21 so that 18-, 19-, and 20 year-olds have something to be excited about when they visit foreign countries. And indeed I was excited, because that night at the disco was the first time I had ever consumed alcohol outside my parents’ supervision. Out of respect for my Russian heritage, I chose as my first-ever bought drink vodka. Actually acquiring the drink, however, took about half an hour, because there wasn’t really any sort of a line system at the field-goal shaped bar and both bartenders pointedly ignored me as I quietly sat there, slowly going deaf. My foul indignation reached a breaking point when I saw Brad arrive at the bar after me and get one, two, THREE drinks while I got nary a one; I then yelled or waved or did something crazy to get the bartender’s attention, and finally got my vodka. I sipped the vodka because I figured if I was forking out thirty shekels (about five bucks) for one measly shot, I might as well draw it out. Marina saw me sipping and exclaimed, “Ew! You’re not supposed to sip shots! You have to drink it all at once!” So I drank the remainder all at once. I don’t know. I still like sipping. Beginning many months before the trip, Marina had maintained constant pressure on me and Irene (and anybody else misfortunate enough to be within sight) to try absinthe. Absinthe is another one of those things that’s illegal in the U.S. but not anywhere else. It’s a green drink with almost one and a half times as much alcohol as vodka, which may be the reason it’s illegal here; that or the hallucinogens it contains. Anyway, Marina once drank absinthe when she visited London and has been talking about it ever since. She said the bartender sprinkled sugar on top of the drink and set it on fire, and then she had to blow it out and drink the absinthe really fast while it was still hot. “It’s the most disgusting thing ever,” Marina said. “You have to try it.” In a rare display of backbone, I determinedly resisted Marina’s attempts to persuade me into what really did not sound like a good time. After it took twelve lifetimes to get a shot of vodka, however, I realized that if I was going to spend vast sums of time and money to get miniscule quantities of drink, I should probably get something that is (1) interesting, (2) unavailable back home, and (3) high in alcohol content. To my deep dismay, absinthe fit the bill to a T and possibly also a W. Irene, who was also initially opposed to drinking the green stuff, independently traveled down similar logical lines, and we both secretly decided to order absinthe. Marina was unaware of our machinations, however, and apparently she was so desperate to make us feel sick that she promised us she’d drink absinthe, too, if we did. The four of us (Yana somehow also got sucked in) then each ordered a shot and chugged simultaneously. Our Israeli absinthe-drinking experience was not nearly as exciting as Marina’s London counterpart, because it did not involve fire. The drink was green; that was about the pinnacle of craziness. To my inexperienced taste buds, absinthe was nothing more than a mildly licoricey vodka. Marina, on the other hand, was truly revulsed by it: after downing her shot, she promptly went outside to the patio area and gazed intently at the rocks as her brain’s desire to keep her dignity fought with her stomach’s desire to vomit. Topping off this delightful spectacle was the gradual discoloration of Marina’s face, which slowly took on the hue of the absinthe she just drank. Her heroic effort to not barf was far and away the greatest moment of the evening and possibly also the entire trip. I wasn’t expecting to have a high tolerance for alcohol. It was late when we got to the disco and dinner had been a long time ago; also, while I like alcohol, I have never consumed it in anything approaching large quantities. Still, I’m a little disappointed that two shots (vodka + absinthe) were enough to make me tipsy. My mouth didn’t close when my brain told me to shut up, and the world didn’t stop moving when my feet told me to stand still. Nevertheless, life suddenly became marginally more enjoyable and I found myself almost appreciating the darkness and the savagely bad music. I think if I would have gulped down another shot or two I might have actually had a good time. So I didn’t drink any more alcohol for the rest of the night. After the absinthe, Marina and Yana and I were sufficiently under the influence to willingly dance in the small, dark dance floor crowded with smelly drunken Jewish people. Marina doesn’t like dancing; I hate it; I don’t think Yana’s a big fan, either; but evidently alcohol can really screw with people. Now, I’ve seen some scary stuff in don’t-drink-and-drive videos — one in particular showed a model’s face after she flew off a highway exit and it looked like a three-dimensional puzzle of a red zombie head that had been gnawed on by rats and then improperly put together — but by far the most frightening anti-alcohol picture I have in my mind is the image of somewhat drunken Marina that night screaming “GUYS, LET’S DANCE!!!” The fact that unreasonable alcohol consumption can make an intelligent person desire dancing — the most pointless, idiotic activity ever conceived of by mankind, except for perhaps watching C-SPAN — was, to me, excessively disconcerting, and I decided that night that I didn’t ever want to get drunk. I had one shot of absinthe and it was fun; my roommate Jeff had five shots and it wasn’t quite as enjoyable. He spent a large portion of the evening moaning and periodically puking into a plastic bag. The following day, when I asked him what exactly was the train of reasoning which had led him to conclude that drinking five shots of absinthe was a good idea, he told me he “wasn’t really feeling anything” after the fourth shot and figured he’d try a fifth. Beyond that we don’t know what happened because Jeff’s memory reel seems to have been snipped, but I imagine he had some whacked out hallucinations. The lesson I can draw from Jeff’s experience is that if you don’t feel drunk after four shots of absinthe, then it is probably a good time to put your shekels away and leave the bar; playing some soothing games of Settlers of Catan might also not be a bad idea. Then again, playing Settlers of Catan is never a bad idea. The holiest Jewish site is the Western Wall, also called the Wailing Wall, located in Jerusalem. The wall is the last remaining part of the holy temple which the Romans destroyed around the same time everything else in Israel happened: two thousand years ago. I think the Romans kicked our asses pretty handily in that particular war, so I’m not entirely sure why they didn’t destroy the entire temple; perhaps they got three fourths of the way done and decided to take a lunch break and then forgot. Whatever the reason, the Wailing Wall’s preservation was extremely fortuitous: the Messiah got the very last building permit from the zoning commission before it was dissolved, so now the Jews aren’t allowed rebuild the temple until he comes back. In the meantime, Jews often go to the wall to pray, cry, and leave funny messages in the cracks. Every month a rabbi takes all the slips of paper out and either buries them or burns them, depending on what the guy said; he spoke kind of fast and nobody could agree afterwards on what word he used. The rabbi probably burns them, because fire is cool. As our group explored this sacred site, the most common deep and profound topic of conversation was: do you think the rabbi reads the notes before he burns/buries them?! I think he does. A lot of them are probably really serious and boring, like, “Dear God, we are sick of all this war and fighting. Please, please bring piss to the Middle East. Much love, — Ezekiel,” or, “Dear God, I was really good this year. Can I pleeeeeeeeease have a puppy? Your the coolest!! — Davey;” but I refuse to believe there isn’t at least one person who sticks in a real silly and hilarious one every now and then like, “Whut-whut whut up G-dawg! I don’t know if you rigged evolution or not, but if you did, I think you should have stopped it after monkeys. — You’re pal, Bobalicious.” I was thinking of writing an amusing note myself, but then I figured there was no point because the rabbi might not read mine (since it’d be in English) and god doesn’t exist, so there wouldn’t be anyone to laugh at my monumental wit. I forgot to mention this before, but the Western Wall is actually such an amazingly holy place that we went there twice. One was on I think the third day of the trip, and the second time was on the last day, which coincided with a major Jewish holiday, and which therefore meant — according to a string of intensely complicated but nevertheless highly accurate logic which you’re just going to have to take my word on — that we absolutely had to go at four o’clock in the morning. Yana, Marina, and Irene were pathetic, lazy pansies, so they slept in and skipped the second visit. They were the only ones. They ought to die. Anyway, on the second visit, the place was absolutely packed: on the first day, I went up to the wall and touched it, so that I could later say I went up to the wall and touched it; but on the second visit, I got to within maybe fifty feet of the wall before I was completely blocked off by the heaving mass of bearded Jewish men wearing suits and black hats. The atmosphere was so charged with fervor and religious passion that even I began to feel it. Notwithstanding my firm conviction in god’s lack of existence, I decided it was very important to write a note (a serious one) and stick it in the wall. In my shorts, sandals, and crusty t-shirt, however, I felt pitifully ridiculous forcibly squeezing past the mob of suited, singing, swaying Jewish men, so I eventually stuck the note back in my pocket and walked away. I guess my succumbing to the intimidation of the religious Jew crowd means I didn’t really believe what I wrote on the note. It stayed in my pocket for a couple of days before I finally threw it away in a trashcan in the New York airport. .: posted by Boris 1:50 AMSunday, January 02, 2005Online Wisdom: Part the SixthIt’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so I figured I’d better repeat the stuff I know I probably said in previous introductions. I keep a text file on my desktop into which I paste stupid things people say to me online. When the file gets big, I dump it into a blog entry and add some lame comments. For your convenience, I edit out most of the typos and irrelevant bits; however, I promise not to do anything obnoxious. For instance, I would never replace fly197: i am everyone in my family's bitch with fly197: I am a heinous bitch even though the change would make the statement considerably more accurate. With that: enjoy! *** slila22: survival of the grossest slila22: ugly fish have survived because they're ugly enough to blend into rocks ChessMen15: I know, but it doesn't seem fair ChessMen15: I'd like for the prettiest things to survive slila22: bor, we'd both be dead. fly197: I am everyone in my family's bitch yb25: I think you are too cynical yb25: it’s probably bad for your health (Meet Jim, my charming and social suitemate) jameshengenius: again, I cant really talk. I just got back from the bookstore with a text on Babylonian mythology. (Here is how everyone wished me a happy birthday) cBearFunk: lets go with jeffs idea for a euchre club this week at your house fronomo530: well, looks like we're having a birthday Euchre Club at your house this week, woo! jameshengenius: Eh, happy birthday? ragingraptorm2: happy birthday rmartyshaw: happy bday S10penguin: really?? S10penguin: happy birthday! slila22: happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear boris, happy birthday to you. happy 19th! ThanatosK: Happy Birthday Boris!!! Thumper 00056: you're old Thumper 00056: no wait, that's me yb25: Happy Birthday Boris! (No two people’s wishes were the same! Yana’s and Billy’s differed by a mere two exclamation marks, though.) slila22: I don't think pissing people off is hilarious slila22: I think you having a sex drive is hilarious fly197: I haven't been in Linux these past few days fly197: finally returned to it fly197: (we missed each other) (Marina’s unhealthy obsession with her computer makes me feel much better about mine) (Wish I knew the context…) fronomo530: oh well, hey, you wanna go out and have gay sex? slila22: anyway bor. slila22: shut the fuck up! ChessMen15: ah, I was waiting for that slila22: why???!?!!! slila22: why didn't you just do it! slila22: goddamnit! fly197: I suck at life (Truest thing Marina ever said.) ChessMen15: crap, however, is bad fly197: it is not! fly197: it is wonderful (Life advice from Lila) slila22 (1:18:12 PM): don't have kids slila22 (1:18:13 PM): ever (Lila telling me what my wife will be like) slila22 (1:21:47 PM): no, she'd have to be crazy to marry you, not stupid. She'd be stupid to bear your children ChessMen15: it doesn't quite work slila22: that's upsetting ChessMen15: well, unless you physically beat me slila22: I could do that ChessMen15: I would ask that you didn't slila22: damnit ChessMen15: a little violent, are we? slila22: kidding ChessMen15: dang ChessMen15: I keep missing it when you joke slila22: hm, good bor ChessMen15: I blame it on the fact that sarcasm doesn't carry well over IM slila22: I blame it on your idiocy ChessMen15: you enjoy hurting my feelings fly197: true. (This will never, ever happen again) fly197: yeah, I see fly197: you're right jameshengenius: or we could go canoeing! jameshengenius: which I've have a strange hankering for recently […] jameshengenius: I always liked using my oars to dump nearby canoes into the water and watching the screaming passengers be swept downstream. (So I guess that explains the hankering) fly197: you make Lila sound like she only ever says hateful things to you. (Which is different from the truth how?) ChessMen15: not a brilliant comment fly197: exactly fly197: well, its you fly197: is brilliance possible, never mind expected? slila22: who? slila22: me and Marina? ChessMen15: yeah slila22: since when do we count as people? (Excellent Rebuttal Tactics 101, by Professor Schwartz) slila22: whateverever loserface TheaVoluptas: brb ChessMen15: k TheaVoluptas: back ChessMen15: welcome back, mate TheaVoluptas: I'm not your mate, and if I am I must be a very unsuccessful one since we don't have any children. (Way to kill my Australian mood, loserface) ChessMen15: besides, Marina's not SO terrible slila22: m... slila22: debatable (Truest thing Lila ever said.) TheaVoluptas: Yo, Boristina, what up? TheaVoluptas: :-) TheaVoluptas: lol, forgive me TheaVoluptas: Couldn't resist TheaVoluptas: I swear (I was there. I was just coldly, coldly ignoring her.) (Valuable clarifications) BadHair17: anyways, I'm off to pee and then eat BadHair17: but not eat my pee IHateAIM410: hi this is kate,, daves sister! IHateAIM410: dave said i could leave you a message IHateAIM410: i'm cooler than he is IHateAIM410: bye (Your syntax sure is a lot worse, though) Thumper 00056: 2+2=4 unless it doesn't fly197: you have threesomes with me and Lila all the time fly197: its never been that exciting (Julie is bipolar) snobuny4ever: HAHA you started school already!!! snobuny4ever: MUAHAHA snobuny4ever: I’m sad I missed you. TheaVoluptas: I'm bored. TheaVoluptas: Come and play with me. TheaVoluptas: I'm having an acne breakout like nobody's business. Luckily they can't really be seen yet. TheaVoluptas: It's funny that acme is so similar to acne (The things she says when I’m not around…) Auto response from BadHair17: Fuck you all!! Oh wait... I mean my computer... fuck my computer... ah what the hell, fuck y'all too ChessMen15: so, what's on your mind? TheaVoluptas: Boys boys boys TheaVoluptas: What else? :-) (Kids, this is what you SHOULDN’T be doing in college) Auto response from bthop23: lots of hw, work, and responsibilities........nothing a few minutes with my good friend Jack Daniels won't cure ChessMen15: how are things with you? fly197: alright fly197: programming fly197: Friday night activity of Marina Mandy: Good. And you should mention, "Unless truly forced to, I will never write about another Mandy that is not my dear wonderful friend Mandy Kessler. Because next to her, all other Mandys pale." Mandy: Something along those lines. :-D ChessMen15: um... ChessMen15: a wee bit harsh, wouldn't you say? Mandy: Oh no, I mean, certainly it doesn't praise me as much as I should be praised, but it doesn't really make me sound bad or anything. :-P Mandy: O:-) (Ego problem?) yb25: but yeah I think I liked it more when your away message was up because then I did not AIM you, and waste away my life online (Talking to me a is a waste of life? Thanks.) (stolen from Marina’s away message) Lila: it'll all work out. I know. I just don't have enough lube yet. Lila: I'll purchase some tomorrow. Mandy: Ahhh!!! A booger just fell out of my nose!!!!!!!!! Mandy: My eye is twitching (stolen from Marina’s away message; only CS majors will understand the hilarity) (22:26:13) joe: well (22:26:15) joe: it does terminate (22:26:20) joe: but only after the stack overflows Auto response from Lila: fuck it dude, let's go bowling. (You are about to witness the proudest moment of Ben’s life) ChessMen15: and seeing Dodgeball again was reasonably entertaining, although the best part of that movie by far is the fact that Kevin was "inspired" to play foursquare Ben H: ha ChessMen15: after watching it, he made Jim get his parents to by a playground ball ChessMen15: and we actually went outside and played foursquare a couple of times ChessMen15: it was fun, although you have to let your dignity fall a few notches Ben H: ok holdon ChessMen15: okay Ben H: I have to savor this moment because it will never happen again................. Ben H: “buy”...............not “by”..........in context from the sentence above Dan: giant red sore on your lip? Dan: ew... Dan: herpes! Dan: ;-) (Politically-minded people’s away messages scare me) Auto response from Ben H: I Hate Ralph Nadar and I want to kill him just to watch him die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! fly197: * Siren changes topic to 'Is it considered oral sex if my pc goes down on me???' S10penguin: do you have a car up there? ChessMen15: alas, no ChessMen15: too lazy to figure out how to get a permit ChessMen15: also, I didn't want all my suitemates constantly bugging me for rides -- none of them have a car S10penguin: ah okay, lol, but that might be fun, you guys could go out on the town on the weekends (not that you guys don't do that already) (Ouch. The bitter, scathing sarcasm has gone highly unappreciated.) TheaVoluptas: brb, in desperate need of deodorant ChessMen15: you stare at the keyboard when you type, though, don't you? ChessMen15: that's gotta be annoying TheaVoluptas: lol, I don't always need to. TheaVoluptas: There, I didn't look at that. TheaVoluptas: Or htat. TheaVoluptas: :-P TheaVoluptas: Or that. TheaVoluptas: Here, I wont look at the keyboard for the rest of the time. ChessMen15: ouch! I am smacked down TheaVoluptas: No lookey. TheaVoluptas: No lookey. ChessMen15: amazing ChessMen15: truly, I am awed TheaVoluptas: Oh be friggin quiet. :-P fly197: algorithm, n.: Trendy dance for hip programmers. (Goodness, this entry seems to be riddled with dumb CS jokes.) TheaVoluptas: How many people do you think just sit around their room naked? (Well, one for sure…) (From Mandy’s profile) "Now Mandy, do I need to rewind this DVD before I can play it again?" -Mrs. Yoder "Okay, time to take notes." "But there's a paperclip on my desk!!"-Gabrielle bthop23: in place of future conversations on the merits or either political party let us just watch the news every night and the legislation that passes in both houses of Congress and let us just sit back and watch as our once great and promising nation goes from quintessential, successful democracy to Neo-Theocracy in which religious law and denominational prejudices rule bthop23: In short, our country is going to shit and we're all going to die (Damn pessimistic liberals) Auto response from slila22: shower time. It's like hammer time, but without pants. Auto response from AdamHorton1: OMFG... that was too close. I had a freaking heart attack... They almost voted Ami off Survivor tonight... she got 4 votes!!! They better not scare me like that again. Homework. Leave me a message. (Oh, how Adam has fallen since college began) Auto response from TheaVoluptas: Man, wearing only one sock feels weird. And when wearing only one sock feels weird, we all know that means that it's time for bed. (Logic has never been Mandy’s strong suit) fly197 (3:38:05 PM): write me a fucking email fly197 (3:38:07 PM): you worthless piece of shit (Can you believe I wrote that wench a letter after this shameless display of rude language?) Auto response from slila22: my dad went to a Bob Dylan concert last night. I made an excel chart of Latin vocab. My dad's cooler than I am. (So true.) Auto response from TheaVoluptas: Sitting on chap stick all day kind of makes your butt hurt. ChessMen15: so how's life? slila22: tough slila22: I should get a helmet Auto response from ChessMen15: Being a worthless slab of rotting flesh. fly197: oooh worthless rotting flesh. fly197: sexy (Why girls are evil, terrible people) fly197: I need to get on that! I haven't yet explored all the excellent uses of boyfriend that there are Energetic56: kangaroos have pockets (It’s good to know your friends are always there when you need them most) ChessMen15: Mandy, I have a question for you TheaVoluptas signed off at 12:22:19 AM. ChessMen15: how long do I have to think about it? fly197: 0 days fly197: its ok, girls are worthless ChessMen15: girls are worthless...guys are worthless...what's that leave? ChessMen15: sheep? fly197: jill. ChessMen15: jill...? fly197: look at your right hand, palm down ChessMen15: bye Marina fly197: f u! (Evidently she did not enjoy the conversation quite as much as I did) Auto response from slila22: "it's called the genetic lottery, and you lost." ~my dad (It’s okay, Lila. I think we all lost.) Auto response from slila22: WASTE OF CARBON. ChessMen15: that's an angry-sounding away message there slila22: only slightly and only because I promised myself I wouldn't go on line for the next week about oh, 8 hours ago Thumper 00056: why do you hate yourself for being on facebook? is it because everybody who's on there is obsessed with showing off how many pretend friends they have? is it because they're all shallow and annoying? is it because cats always land on their feet? (Mmm…yes.) ChessMen15: evening, Marina fly197: shut up ChessMen15: doesn't it kind of bother you, though? ChessMen15: that you're driven not by a passion for learning, but by cold greed? AdamHorton1: yeah AdamHorton1: it eats me up from inside AdamHorton1: but oh well (Classic away message, compliments of Ashley) Auto response from Energetic56: Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream... Haha! Fooled you! I'm a submarine! ChessMen15: could you attach the story to your next email? ChessMen15: that way, I can put my name on it and publish it yb25: sure (Look before you type!) yb25: you’re too innocent ChessMen15: just in that one respect yb25: oh yeah I forgot how worldly and experienced you are in other areas of life (THANK YOU for the sarcasm, everyone. You can stop it now.) BookFishy: My shirt smells like someone else. :- ChessMen15: you're a bad person ChessMen15: :-) BookFishy: lol BookFishy: Yes, but a horny bad person. slila22: a sandwich, bowl of cereal, and clementines is healthy ChessMen15: that is not a serious dinner slila22: it's just disorganized ChessMen15: that's like a light brunch slila22: it's a lot of food. I'm going to kill you. I don't even know what I'm doing for dinner. Just stop being annoying. slila22: it's my job ChessMen15: being annoying? slila22: yes (I think she was crying. What do you think?) BookFishy: Anne says you're allowed to lust after her (Thanks, I think I’ll pass.) BookFishy: (I just now realized that I'm sitting on a wet towel. What a dolt I am) How are they? (Probably not very comfortable?) NerdamI2k: and he's got an entire box full of DnD, WH40k books under his bed NerdamI2k: I've never felt so out nerded (With this perceptive insight, Yana joins Lila in the ranks of Online Wisdom gurus) yb25: I'm not extravagant with money but I would rather have one nice thing than like 100 crappy things yb25: my mother calls it smart yb25: I don't know if it so yb25: because I think “smart” would be like one crappy thing yb25: ok I see what you’re saying yb25: but I don't care (I seem to get this sort of thing a lot) yb25: I am starting to think about why I suffer yb25: but I don't really suffer yb25: I just need to get back to the ghetto to get my act together (You must understand the irony of this coming from a chemical engineering major at Johns Hopkins) And now, to finish off this bi-annual installment, we end with a couple quintessential quotes quite atrociously ripped out of context: Mandy: I got it off, don't worry. Mmm, it was yummy. ChessMen15: if I do it now, it'll be quite short Mandy: Oh well, I want it now! *** Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple of months! .: posted by Boris 6:45 PMMonday, September 27, 2004My Humble Beginnings as a Crack ReporterA few days ago the Carlton Complex Council sent out a mass email saying it was looking for someone to report on CCC events. I eagerly replied, dizzy with glorious visions of daring reporting and being published. Even though my writing would probably take up a fingernail-sized square in some newsletter that nobody ever reads, I was nevertheless convinced that this small step was to be the takeoff point for my breezy, carefree flight to journalistic fame and glory. Judging by the enthusiastic response I received from Melinda, the Assistant Second Year Coordinator, I was the only person who expressed interest in the job, which was good, because otherwise there may have been some sort of selection process and the CCC people would have realized I’m an incompetent idiot. The first event I covered was the Race at Case window painting contest. In case you didn’t know, Case is hosting the vice presidential debates this year so that we can finally have something to advertise and maybe actually convince a few people to come here (previously the top ad slogan anybody could come up with was, “Case: the only university where you download porn off the network at 15 megabytes per second.”) The point of the window paintings was to depict a race between a donkey (the symbol of the democratic party) and an elephant (the symbol of fat), creating an obvious allusion to the famous fable wherein a hare, overconfident in his ability to beat a tortoise in a race, takes a McDonald’s lunch break midway through the course and chokes to death on a chicken head uncovered in one of his McNuggets. The Donkey vs. Elephant race, I imagine, follows along somewhat dissimilar lines; the donkey, upon losing, demands numerous reviews of the instant replay footage, and when they confirm his loss, blames his defeat on the faulty camera. Michelson, the dorm I live in, and therefore clearly the coolest dorm in existence, at least until it’s torn down next year, had to paint the start of the race; Glazer, the middle; and Kusch, the finish. Michelson had its painting session on Saturday, Glazer on Sunday, and Kusch on Monday, evidently so that people could participate in all three, although no one is really sure why anybody would want to. I came to the third and last session to get the complete scoop on the event. When I arrived at Kusch at 8:30 for their window painting event, I raised the total population present by 25%. (Futile attempts to raise attendance were made throughout the course of the evening by offering free Chinese food to hapless passerby.) Seconds after making my acquaintance, the president offered me encouraging advice that would later be of great benefit to me in my journalistic endeavors: “You suck, jackass.” His name was Jeff. The other power players at this big bonanza were Evan, the vice president, whose primary function was, as I understood it, to crack jokes; Mandy, the somebody or other, whose primary function was to say stupid things for Jeff to crack jokes on; and some other girl whose name and position I probably would have ascertained if I had any journalistic skill whatsoever. I learned that the winner of the window-painting contest will be decided the weekend before the highly-hyped debate. Decided by whom, I do not know; possibly squirrels. In any event, the winning dorm will receive a modest monetary prize and then, according to Mandy, “do absolutely nothing with it.” Mandy was tasked with painting a grandstand with “VOTE!” in big letters swathed across it. The people in the grandstand, presumably spectators of the race, constituted a diverse crowd representing all the major ethnic groups of the world: black people, brown people, and red people. Mandy’s beautiful rendition of the scene was marred slightly by the eventual realization that she, despite being an English major and therefore theoretically having a solid grasp on how the English language works, had forgotten to account for the fact that letters from outside will be seen in reverse; hence, the painting’s viewers would see ETOV (with the E flipped). Evan chided her silly error and there followed a heated argument as to whether or not Norton or Raymond had prettier pictures for the window painting contest last year. Although the argument did not reach a satisfying conclusion while I was there, I can assure you without any doubt that by far the best window paintings were, in fact, at my dorm Tyler. I myself am not an artistic person, so the fine art of window painting was completely beyond me. A critical element of the process, I found out, was attacking the size of Evan’s penis. In his defense Evan asserted, “I really do have a small penis. Mandy’s seen it twice.” There was then a discussion among the group’s two other members regarding the validity of Evan’s claim that Mandy had seen his penis. Having known Mandy and Evan for approximately five minutes at the time, I could not say whether Mandy had or had not seen the goods, but she did drop her fortune cookie in the paint. Although the turnout at the Kusch painting session was small, Evan claimed that at one of the other buildings there were as many as ten people. When asked about the large variation between other buildings’ attendance and hers, Mandy explained that it was “because people in those buildings actually care.” Window painting is a very difficult and imprecise art form, so I am certain that it was not for any lack of artistic talent that the Kusch elephant looked like a giant toxic smog cloud with a potbelly. The donkey, whose hind legs and greater majority of upper body had been engulfed by the toxic elephant, had ears that looked suspiciously like the kind of horns you would expect to see on Satan. I am guessing the members of Kusch do not particularly care for either political party. One side of the Glazer building shows the elephant lumbering up the aptly named Elephant Stairs, while the donkey is depicted doing the same on the other side. In this manner the pictures do not explain who is winning the race, because the universe seems to have split into two alternate dimensions, but they do reveal an interesting aspect of the Elephant Stairs of which I was heretofore completely unaware: namely, that the underside of the stairs is dripping with acid slime. My own dorm Michelson’s windows show the donkey and elephant standing on the grass under a huge “START” sign, waiting for the race to begin. I should warn you, however, that this is a fairly inventive interpretation of the paintings; at first glance it appears that the donkey and elephant are falling out of the sky and are about to land on a bed of huge green spikes. Who will win the exciting window painting contest? The evil Smog Elephant and the Satan Donkey? The Alternate Universe Acid Foot Elephant and Donkey Duo? Or the About-To-Be-Impaled gang? Be sure to check back here in a few weeks! Because you don’t get the whole story unless you get the Bor story. .: posted by Boris 11:48 PMTuesday, September 14, 2004Israel, Part 3: Yes, We're Actually In Israel NowShabbat was a great tour guide. Unlike some tour guides I’ve had in the past, he could tell when the popular mood was desirous of sleep, and didn’t talk at those times. In general, though, he spoke quite a bit; and though his imperfect English was punctuated fairly frequently with “um” and “ah” and — my favorite — “AEGHHHHHHHHHHHH”, he was generally pleasant to listen to and told us lots and lots of interesting things that I could probably fill up fifty pages with if I weren’t lazy and remembered what they were. I would say a good 64% of the stories he told us began with, “Two thousand years ago…” because apparently that’s when most of the interesting stuff in Israel happened. Shortly thereafter, the Hebrews got their asses kicked by the Romans and things weren’t so happy for the next couple millennia. The tour bus was a mildly luxurious charter bus with overhead racks just narrow enough to stop my backpack from fitting. Also, because the side entrance to the bus was on the right side, the seats on the right side of the bus had significantly less leg room than their left side counterparts. Interestingly, I did not notice the difference until very near the end of trip, when Marina pointed it out to me. I’m guessing most people were stupid and unobservant like me; otherwise I expect there would have been nuclear warfare before every commute to determine who got to sit on the left because let me tell you, normal legs just didn’t fit in the right seats. Our first stop was a scenic spot overlooking the old quarter of Jerusalem in the distance. Meeting us here was a group of three singing, drum-banging men dressed in what appeared to be togas who I thought were ruffian beggars that our tour guides would shoo away. Instead it turned out we hired them. Marvelous. One of the freaky toga singers was equipped with a microphone, so as to torture us better. The drums never stopped pounding their swaying, hypnotic rhythm; the miked singer never stopped screaming. Eventually the drummers coaxed a few mentally imbalanced people from our group into dancing in a circle to the joyful never-ending song. It was not a benign, mind-its-own-business kind of circle, though; this circle was evil, cancerous, forcibly sucking into itself innocent onlookers standing too close to the edge. You could see the horror on the victims’ faces when one of the way-too-friendly-looking toga men would grab their hands, beaming a smile of comradeship, mirth, and threat that if you didn’t join the circle, that smile would eat out your eyeballs. Upon noting the development of the cancer circle, everybody quickly took three, four, or sometimes as many as fifty steps back, some disappearing from the trip forever. At one point, the lead singer offered us a chance to sing. Nobody took up the offer, whether due to embarrassment or the hope that if no one accepted, we would sooner go home. Nobody, that is, except for Brad, an alcoholic smoker with bad knees and a terrible singing voice. Brad got drunk pretty much every night and allegedly passed out twice on a couch, pissing his pants both times. I personally cannot validate the rumor, but there it is. In any case, Brad sang a decent song, and then a not so decent one, which despite the drummers’ vainest efforts failed to follow anything akin to a beat. Eventually the lead singer politely but forcefully dispossessed Brad of the microphone and the hectic pounding/singing/screaming/evil dance circling continued. Somewhere in the middle of all this, we took a break to hear a welcoming speech from Shabbat that probably involved something which happened two thousand years ago. Shabbat also presented us with challah, the traditional Jewish bread, and some traditional Jewish wine. I tore myself a hunk of bread but skipped on the wine; any Jewish person can tell you why. Challah is quite yummy, but the wine…how do I explain this?...fill a tub with grape juice, add forty cups of sugar, then a small packet of mayonnaise, and finally a dead hamster, then let it rot in the sun for a couple of days — that’s Jewish wine. Not enjoyable. After the welcoming ceremony finally ended, we drove to our hotel and received room assignments. There were three people to a room; I was paired with some random kid from the other bus I had never seen before, and Brad. To be fair, at this time I did not yet know about Brad’s drinking problem or his inability to retain his consciousness or his urine, because of course none of these infamous escapades had happened yet, but I did know that he smoked, talked really loudly, and sang, without any shame or talent whatsoever, in front of over ninety perfect strangers; from these facts I gathered that Brad was probably not the type of guy who peacefully read books in the evening and went to bed at 10:30. My room assignment worried me, and I wondered if I was going to get any sleep on the trip. Brad, like me, had a few friends on the trip, and fortunately some of his friends were male, meaning he could room with them. One such friend, Jordan, who was a decent-enough chap even though he wore big goofy sunglasses all the time, came up to Brad after we had gotten our room key and asked if either me or the other kid would be willing to trade rooms with him. As quickly as was possible without betraying my swelling desire to get away from Brad, I agreed. Jordan said his roomies were brothers who were “very cool guys.” They could have been a pot-smoking gay couple for all I cared; I figured the risk was worth it. Luck was beside me, because my new roommates were awesome: Jeff, the bearded, law-school-bound opera/English major; and his brother Mike, who had a computer science job of some sort that he hated. I didn’t ever talk to Mike very much, but he was a big sports fan, and on our first evening together asked if I would mind if he watched some sports game at 3:00 AM. I said I didn’t mind at all, even though I minded a great deal, but it turned out he was joking. At least, I assume he was joking; possibly he turned the game on and I slept through it. Mike’s toiletries bag was designed, on the outside, to look just like a basketball. Jeff and Mike were both quite intelligent. When we were all lying in bed on the first evening, they flipped the TV to an Israeli news program. As I slowly realized that Jeff had no intention of changing the channel, I began wondering why they would want to watch the news in a foreign language. “Oh, by the way,” Jeff suddenly said, perhaps noting the puzzled expression on my face, “we both speak fluent Hebrew.” “Really?” “No.” After we received our room assignments, or possibly before, or maybe even during, heck if I remember, Quest and Foot each had a separate group meeting. We sat in a circle and played another icebreaker, although this one was much grander in scope than the LICE game and involved a ball of yarn. One person started out holding the ball of yarn and had to talk about himself, where he was from etc, and then conclude by expounding on his reasons for coming to Israel and what he hoped to get out of this trip. Naturally a lot of BS was involved here, because what 95% of the trip’s participants wanted was a free trip to Israel, but you couldn’t really say that. You had to say that you wanted to forge a deep connection to your spiritual Judaism and uncover your cultural heritage and walk on the sacred soil and breathe the hallowed air of your ancestors or whatever. Then, when the person finished talking, he had to pass or throw the ball of yarn to somebody else in the circle, but hold on to a few loops of string, so that after everybody had spoken, there was a big tangled interconnected mess of yarn in the middle of the room, and frankly I forget what the hell we did with it. Chuck — a friendly guy with a penchant for smoking, tattoos, and body piercings — and Brad somehow managed to get thoroughly trashed before the meeting/yarn game, and consequently made loud, unhumorous comments throughout the entirety of the evening. Israel, like all foreign countries except Canada, has much more to see and do than can be seen and done in ten days, but that didn’t stop us from trying. We went to sleep late, got up early, and a lot of times I felt like I wasn’t really seeing Israel at all, but rather fighting to survive from one bathroom break to the next. Although I assure you Israel is a perfectly civilized country with very decent plumbing, peeing in the woods was a necessity for me on at least one occasion I recall, and a common habit for others, some of them girls. Whenever we had the opportunity, those of us who didn’t much care for guzzling alcohol usually went to sleep as soon as the opportunity presented itself. So when the phone rang at 11:30 the first night, Jeff, Mike and I were already lying in bed with the lights out. Please, I prayed, please don’t let it be for me. Please don’t tell me it’s my stupid da— “Boris, it’s for you,” Mike’s groggy voice groaned in the darkness. Fuck. With a sigh, I clambered out of bed and poked around the black room until I hit Mike’s hand and found the phone, which was situated such that when I held it the cord probably lay across Mike’s face. My dad wanted to know how things were going and all that other crap, which I told him in as brief a manner as possible without making any effort to conceal that (1) he had woken us up, (2) I was pissed, (3) and embarrassed. The next day, Tuesday, we went in the morning to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial. Some of you may know about The United States Holocaust Memorial in Washington, DC; Yad Vashem is, depending on who you ask, either basically the same thing, or completely different. After seeing Yad Vashem with my own eyes and giving the matter much thought, I decided that the two memorials are in fact quite different; the largest difference being, that unlike Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial is a memorial I have never actually visited. Our tour of the memorial was interesting and informative, highlighting an individualistic, personal side of the Holocaust that is often glossed over when people talk about the large, tragic numbers of victims. The guide spoke with a good accent and had a better command of the English language than some Americans I’ve met, for example Brad. In addition to going over the basic history of how the Holocaust progressed and how the minority of Nazis in Germany were able to brainwash the rest of the population into offering no resistance to their atrocious schemes, she told us many small-scale, personal stories that powerfully conveyed the sadness and the terror of the era. The memorial consisted of several buildings, the coolest of which had a long, dark hallway with mirrors everywhere. Somehow, these mirrors were arranged around just six candles so that it looked like there were a million candles flickering all over the place. Recorded voices in several languages gravely read the names and ages of kids who had died. Although photography was not permitted in many parts of the memorial, it wasn’t prohibited everywhere, a fact which Irene utilized to full advantage and took fifty billion pictures of me looking like an idiot eating a sandwich. After the memorial we went on a day hike, taking the Spring path from Kennedy Memorial Park through Ein Hindak to the Sataf. At least, that’s what the itinerary says. From now on I won’t talk about each individual hike, partly to avoid needlessly straining my memory and partly because let’s face it, hikes are pretty boring to talk about. Basically, whenever we weren’t doing something touristy, we were hiking. One of the neat things about Israel is that it’s not all barren desert like I expected — there were rocky hikes, bushy hikes, watery hikes, hikes with caves, hikes with possibly poisonous berries that people ate anyway; there were a lot of hikes. We were Foot, after all. My favorite hikes were the ones where we got to explore caves. Cave crawling left some of the fondest impressions in probably everybody’s recollection of the trip, except for the losers. Crawling on my knees and sometimes even my stomach through cramped, dirty tunnels in the ground made me feel much cooler than I really am. One of the most exciting such hikes was a forty minute trek through a water tunnel that was built (you guessed it) two thousand years ago. The water came up to my knees at times and the ceiling was so low that in some places even Irene had to duck. You can imagine, then, how sore Yana and I were by the time we got out. The tunnel was pitch black; I couldn’t see my proverbial hand in front of my proverbial face. Although there were a number of flashlights that were supposed to be dispersed throughout the group, somehow they all wound up in the very front and very back, whereas our clump was in the middle. We couldn’t catch up to the people in front of us because they got too far ahead, and we couldn’t slow down to wait for the people behind us because walking through complete darkness gave us the juicy illusion that we were hardcore. I was at the back of our group, which was a nice place to be because if, for example, we encountered a sudden drop and the people at the people at the front of the group sprained their ankles on it, they were usually nice enough to pass a verbal warning back. Whenever Marina said, “I’m ducking,” I got ready to double over. Since everybody was blind, the best way to travel was to grab on to the straps of the backpack of the person in front of you. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t think to take hold of Yana’s backpack until we were already enshrouded in darkness; I couldn’t see where the straps were, and since straps are generally located at the base of the backpack, I didn’t particularly feel like groping around down there lest I accidentally grab Yana’s ass. As enjoyable as that would have been, we hadn’t yet been in Israel long and I thought it imprudent to create tension for the rest of the trip. So I had to maintain my hold on the middle portion of her backpack by means of a little plastic ring that gradually cut off all circulation to my right index and all subsequent fingers. .: posted by Boris 9:11 AMWednesday, August 25, 2004And I Thought Kerry Flip-Flopped...Interesting factoid I picked up from history class today: Most of you have probably heard, or will hear the distant ring of bells upon hearing, the following famous quote: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I bet fewer of you know the author of that quote -- a Spanish philosopher named George Santayana -- and I bet fewer still of you are aware that the same philosopher was also responsible for this quote: "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there." Sweet. .: posted by Boris 8:36 PMWednesday, August 18, 2004Freedom of Speech[This Sunday I leave for college, which means today I probably would have been wise to start packing. Instead, I began the highly valuable and intellectually challenging task of organizing my word documents, putting them from one big folder into lots of little ones. I didn't come close to finishing, but I did discover an old, unposted blog entry which I had for some reason saved in the same folder as all my other documents instead of my separate Blog folder. Expecting a half-finished piece of garbage, I was much surprised when I read the entry and saw that it was pretty much finished. Why I never actually posted it, I have no clue -- maybe I meant to add more and never got around to it, or maybe I just simply forgot. In any case, here it is, very late, and better late than never.] I’m sure that at one time or another you’ve all witnessed or been affected by what I like to call “the TV Effect.” It’s basically the phenomenon that if there’s a TV turned on, people nearby will watch it, even if it’s something unimaginably stupid and boring, like that one show where two families switch houses, redecorate them, and switch back. A recent example that comes to mind was when Michelle and I were over at Andy’s house to study for a genetics quiz. Basketball was on. I hate basketball. So does Andy. So does Michelle. Yet we were all watching it, to the point where it interfered with our studying: ANDY: Hmm, I’m not really sure how to do #5. BORIS: Well, to find the probability for three traits, don’t you just find the probability for each individual one and then multiply them together? [here the TV Effect strikes a defenseless Boris] ANDY: I’m not getting the answer in the back of the book. MICHELLE: Neither am I. ANDY: Boris, what’d you get? BORIS: … ANDY: Boris? BORIS: [watching basketball] ANDY: BORIS! Quit watching basketball! BORIS: Oh! What? Uh…what problem are we on? Another incidence of the TV Effect occurred yesterday, when my parents were watching the Academy Awards. I personally find the Oscar business mind-numbingly dull, but whenever I passed by the family room I would become frozen in my tracks, mesmerized by the latest interminable thank-you speech or the random series of movie clips. Actually, I probably would have ended up watching the whole thing except my parents have this ingratiatingly irritating habit of hitting the Mute button whenever the commercials come on. Somebody’s really gonna have to explain the logic of this habit to me. The whole point of watching TV is to not think, and preferably also to not move. Muting when the commercials start and un-muting when they end requires way too much thought and muscle movement; TV is supposed to be a time for your brain to take a break. And there’s a logical gap. If you mute the commercials to avoid watching them, YOU STILL HAVE TO WATCH THEM!! Otherwise, how will you know when the show is back on?? I have the same problem with those annoying people who switch channels during commercials: what possible gratification can you get by watching three minutes of another show, especially considering that throughout the entire duration of those three minutes you will be ill at ease and your brain will be anything but shut off, thinking constantly of the show on the other channel and hoping frantically that you’ll remember to switch back before the commercials end? Anyway, the muting thing. I can’t take it. With my parents muting the commercials, there’s no way I could have sat through the four or however many hours of Academy Awards presentations. The silent ads would have been doubly irritating because in the case of the Oscars, akin to the Super Bowl, the commercials are by far the best part. Let’s be honest — does anybody REALLY care about most of the stuff that goes on at the Oscars? I especially hate the announcement of the winners. After presenting boatload upon boatload of stupid crap that has nothing to do with the Oscars, they FINALLY get to the Best Picture, and then what do they do? Announce the nominees and say the winner. Bam, five seconds, they’re done. People deserve to be shot for making anticlimactic endings like that. I mean, this is the part that everyone has been WAITING for. Couldn’t they do something special? Couldn’t the final award be punctuated by, oh, I don’t know, a live 1000-man orchestra performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture replete with cannon and machinegun fire? And then amidst the chaos everybody would leap to their feet, form a mob, heave the winners atop the arms of the crowd, and charge the stage, whereupon they’d drop the victorious crew near the mike with their clothes ripped and their glasses broken. Or something like that. Instead they take a cue from The Price is Right and show the winners clambering out of the crowded audience and making their way over to the stage, which is supposed to be dramatic but in fact gets old really quick. Another thing that gets old really quick is how none of the winners have prepared thank-you speeches. If you’re nominated for an Oscar, WHY wouldn’t you take five seconds of your time beforehand to prepare a nice, short speech?! Sure, the chances of you actually winning are small, but do you really want to have the memory of the crowning achievement of your life followed immediately thereafter by the memory of you making a fool of yourself in front of millions of people with a dry, overly long speech in which every third letter is punctuated by UH or UM or WOW I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS? So getting back to the story — I didn’t watch all of the Academy Awards, despite the overpowering TV Effect. But I did hear most of them, because when the TV is on in our house, you hear it EVERYWHERE. I didn’t catch any of the commercials, because my parents muted those, but I did pick up a good number of speeches and winners from the comfort of the computer room, where the computer was blasting the living tar out of me in Hearts. One of the speeches stands out in my mind, and if you watched the Awards, you can probably guess which one it was — the thank-you speech Michael Moore gave upon his receipt of the Best Documentary Oscar for his film “Bowling for Columbine.” Though you probably shouldn’t call it a thank-you speech. Sitting far away from the TV and not paying complete attention (Hearts requires a lot of concentration, you know), I wasn’t alerted to the fact that something weird was going on until I heard loud boos emanating from the TV. What could possibly make an Oscar audience boo?, I thought. If those idiots will applaud for gaudily overdressed actresses wearing sixteen metric tons of mascara who get up there and gasp like beached carp and then personally thank, by name, the entire populace of Liechtenstein, then they’ll applaud for anybody, right? Nope. Though supposedly some people stood up and applauded (according to a now-gone Yahoo news story), many of the audience members became pissed fast when Mr. Moore decided to use his thank-you speech as an opportunity to denounce Bush and the war in Iraq. The loud booing continued all the way through Moore’s mercifully short speech, and then the fruity Academy Awards trumpet music came on to signify the commercial break as though nothing had happened. My parents dutifully hit the mute button and I thought, “Ha ha! I bet he’s never gonna get an Oscar again!” A short while later, when I had taken enough punishment from the computer at that incredibly stupid but unbelievably addicting little card game, I decided to go to bed. My parents, who have a TV in their bedroom and could easily have finished watching the Oscars there, were nice enough to instead stay in the family room, which is separated from my bedroom by a thin wall that is about as soundproof as bubble paper is bulletproof. Just because their only son was going to bed didn’t mean that he wanted to do something as silly as sleep. Surely what he really wanted was to have the rest of the Academy Awards thunder in his ears for half the night! Their obsessive commercial muting was a nice added touch: during each silence I would think that it was all finally over, but then…BAM!! LOUD FRUITY TRUMPET MUSIC!! WAKEY WAKEY! Here come more speeches! Yeah, that was quite a fun night. But here I go again, wandering down bitter side paths and straying from my story (you do know that there's a story in here, right?). While listening to the rest of the murderously boring speeches that would have been blissfully soporific if only they weren’t so goddam loud, I heard another one that I found really interesting. It was given by some old-sounding lady who was presenting the Oscar for Best Song. It was all mushy and patriotic and stuff, splattered throughout with heart-wrenching sentiments that made the audience applaud. She concluded by saying that she was “proud” and “honored” to live in a country where “everybody has the right to say what they think.” Whether or not any of her sputtering jabber had anything at all to do with the Best Song was a dubious matter, but the audience applauded nonetheless, and to me, the applause was very hypocritical. The right of free speech — these people applauded the sappy, senile woman who praised it, but earlier had booed off the stage the man who had actually exercised it. What gives? Exhausted after making an observation that used up my entire month’s supply of Insightful Thoughts rations, I grudgingly listened to the rest of the stupid awards ceremony in a half-comatose state and then at last lapsed into sleep. .: posted by Boris 7:40 PMSunday, July 25, 2004Israel, Part Two: If You Haven't Already Done So, You May Want To Read Part One. Or You May Not, Because It's Really BoringWith ten seats per row in the middle and eight seats per row in the back, plus a special second floor for first class, the El Al plane was the biggest I have ever been on. I got an aisle seat in the right section around row 50, a rather nice seat, but the guy who had the window seat in that section immediately asked me if I wanted to switch and I agreed because I’m a spineless idiot. So I ended up sitting next to a window, trapped, unable visit my friends, pee, or do anything else. The one thing I could theoretically do was write, but to write I needed a journal, and to get a journal I needed Marina, and to get Marina I needed an aisle seat, which I foolishly lost. Marina was near row 15, and when the seat belt sign went off and I saw that my two seatmates had no intention of getting up, I despaired of ever obtaining the precious journal — with the aisles likely to be crowded by listless passengers and drink-serving stewardesses, and with 35 rows between my seat and hers, getting Marina was impossible. That I’d have to pester the two strangers in my section to get up so that I could get out, and then again later so that I could get back in, only made me want to try even less. But those who know me will tell you that I am not a man who just gives up and quits in the face of adversity and danger. I give up in the face of unpleasantness and mild discomfort, too. So I gave up, rationalizing my cowardice and laziness with the thought that Marina probably wanted the journal for herself anyway. When the plane reached cruising altitude and the diseased shitpot called New York was safely behind me, I began to write on some pages torn out of one of those free airline magazines. Luckily, the magazine had a few alcohol ads with nice, large, blank backgrounds, which were okay enough to write on, although I still had to maneuver around the bottles. Better than nothing, I supposed, but still fairly depressing, especially when I could have had a journal. If only I hadn’t given up the aisle seat… Suddenly, to my elated astonishment, I saw Marina fighting her way down the aisle. It was the wrong aisle, of course, and from way the heck over on the wrong side of the plane, I looked longingly at Marina. Finally she saw where I was sitting and we made eye contact; although I, being a guy, can never fully master the female art of communicating via eye contact, I’ve known Marina for a long time and I can figure her eyes out a little sometimes and I believe at that moment her eyes said, “Fuck.” Then she began elbowing her way back up the aisle, and soon disappeared up ahead. A while later she returned down the aisle, the correct aisle this time, and slowly made her way over to my seat. Marina would later remark, frequently, upon the insufferable ordeals she courageously faced whilst traversing those thirty-five rows. Squeezing past fat stomachs, jumping over drink carts, ducking between legs (at 5’1”, Marina is really short, and short people are good at such things), kicking aside obnoxious bathroom-goers — these are, I imagine, the trials Marina braved so as to render the journal to my grateful arms. Giving up her journal gave me the ability to write and kill a lot of time, and prevented her from doing the same; furthermore, performing this selfless act of kindness cost Marina a great deal of effort and frustration. I was grateful beyond words. Marina’s noble sacrifice showed me that even though she is incredibly mean, and vicious, and calls me “worthless” and insults me on a quarter-hourly basis, and seemed cheerfully near, on the plane to New York, to vomiting all over the entire expanse of my lap, and told Natalie Lesser, in sixth grade, in horrifying violation of many earnest assurances that she would tell nobody, that I had a crush on said Natalie, in my presence no less — in spite of all these things, I saw then that Marina did in fact possess love and warmth — albeit perhaps in a microscopic quantity buried hidden and rotting in a dank and moldy corner somewhere deep within the scabrous, ashen passages of her charcoal heart — but love and warmth nonetheless. Yes, I was grateful beyond words, which is why I probably should have taken the journal and kept my mouth shut. Instead I spoke, and with eloquence and brevity tried to express to Marina my undying gratitude for her magnificent deed. This expression of thanks would have been quite magnificent itself, were it not for my sore lacking in both eloquence and brevity, resulting in an incoherent babble that fell deaf to Marina’s annoyed ears because she was at that moment being stampeded by a torrent of mobile irate passengers, about as welcome in the aisle as a ten-pound kidney stone in the urinary tract. Finally I stopped speaking, or maybe Marina just told me to shut up, and then she left, disappearing forever into the sweaty mists of the forward seating section. Procrastination is one of the most potent forces in the universe, right up there with hydrogen bombs and quasars. I have always been a huge procrastinator when it comes to writing, but I thought that since I was chained up in a window seat for ten hours with nothing to do except write, I would write, especially since I don’t really know what a “quasar” is. Yeah. Amazing, really, how many things, other than writing of course, I found instead to occupy my time: eating, reading, sleeping, trying to sleep, pretending to sleep, pretending to try to sleep, just plain sitting, pretending to just plain sit but actually trying to sleep, and on and on, all the while Marina’s battle-scarred journal sat idle in my seatback pocket smushed next to the headphones and the magazine with the torn-out alcohol ads. Speaking of eating, I have to say that the El Al dinner was marvelous. A few hours into the flight I developed a frightening hunger and, along with it, the gnawing fear that I would have to consume my entire supply of Nutri-Grain bars. But the dinner was so delicious and so filling that I couldn’t even finish the breakfast the stewardess served several hours later, let alone the Nutri-Grain bars (which by then were no longer bar-like in their composition, due to the forcible compaction process that had long ago turned them into raspberry-scented granola paste inside my backpack). Quite a feat given that airline food is generally about as appetizing as sawdust. For breakfast we had a choice between an omelet and some other thing. Airline omelet sounded like a bad move so I chose the other thing, which I don’t remember what it was except that it was gross and I didn’t eat it. I was the only person, as far as I later gathered, who thought the flight was too short. When the plane began its descent into Israel, other people sighed with exaltation at the visible end of the miserable, cramped, ten-hour journey, and the visible beginning of an exciting, wonderful, life-changing experience. But not me. I was still scribbling furiously about Irene’s bad experience with the security interview. Not even at the icebreaker yet! I fumed. I might have finished chronicling the events of the day had I not been such a procrastinating lazy bastard, and had I not wasted so much time writing an introductory treatise on automatic bathrooms, which segued nicely into the actual story but was otherwise long and entirely irrelevant and un-noteworthy save for my successful usage of the phrase “handjob soap machine” in a valid sentence. On Saturday, May 16, I woke up in my bed at home for the last time. Twenty-one hours and a little over eight pages later, I finally took my first step on Israeli soil in the Jerusalem airport. It was beautiful. It was stupendous. It was stupid and boring just like every other airport. The ATM didn’t like my card and wouldn’t give me any money, even though I really wanted money. My bank account seriously had money in it, too — the blasted ATM must have been in cahoots with the evil interrogator lady who didn’t like me. “He’s a bad Jew — let him STARVE!!” I bet that’s the message the interrogator lady sent to the ATM. Luckily I had brought spare cash with me, sixty dollars of which I traded in for a little over two-hundred fifty of the Israeli Shekels. So take THAT, bitch. The gals and I decided — which is to say, the gals decided — that we should get money first and luggage later. By the time we got the money issue settled, everybody else had already taken their luggage off the conveyor, so there weren’t many suitcases left on the merry-go-round and ours were easy to find. Except for Irene’s. Her suitcase wasn’t there. Perhaps — a chill ran down my spine at the thought — Irene (or should I say “Irene”) was actually indeed a terrorist, and security discovered, in her suitcase, among other things, a nuclear warhead. Then they confiscated the luggage and were about to go arrest Irene, but the warhead blew up and everybody died, along with Irene’s underwear. Upon not seeing her luggage, Irene began to panic, ostensibly because her luggage was gone, but truthfully because her jig was up. It turned out that Irene was blinder than a blind bat and didn’t realize that the conveyor had stopped moving and that her suitcase was sitting very peacefully by its lonesome self on the other side of the baggage claim. Suitcases in hand and Shekels in wallet, everybody assembled for some introductory words of welcome and preliminary announcements, which must not have been very important because I don’t remember any of them. The junior coordinators performed a random passport check, the point of which I’m not entirely clear on except that Irene wasn’t chosen for it, a major stroke of luck that ensured her true, thieving terrorist identity would remain unknown. At this time we also met our tour guide, a handsome man in his early fifties named Shabbat. “Shabbat” is also the word for Saturday, the Jewish day of rest, except with the other syllable stressed — so, the guide’s name was SHA-butt whereas the weekly holiday is pronounced sha-ASS, er, excuse me, sha-BUTT. Syllable vagaries aside, Shabbat’s name was very fitting and Jewish, as was the name of the Quest bus’s tour guide: “Israeli.” Surely the Jewishness of our tour guides’ names was a good omen. .: posted by Boris 5:36 PM |
|
