a long week followed by an awesome weekend

last week draggggged for years, mostly because of working longer days and Iris and Noa not being there to commiserate on Wednesday and Thursday, but overall, it was good...lots of fun times with Roee, and even some quality IM time with Amitai. enzywayz...

this past weekend i went with Gali and Yamit to an Aviv Geffen concert on Masada at 4am followed by some lathering on of dead sea mud and floating around in the dead sea itself. Aviv Geffen's voice is somewhat hard to take after a while, but he was there with Daniel Solomon who i LURV and Metropolin was their opening band which was cool. The whole experience of being on Masada at sunrise is amazing, regardless of the circumstances that brought you there, and I haven't been for more than 6years now, so it was fun and i'm really happy that we went. We were all upside down tired by the morning after not sleeping, especially since i spent the past week not really sleeping so much...but after some healthy mud and dead sea at Ein Gedi, we napped by the pool for a while before heading back to PT. I love how everything is much much funnier when you're exhausted and while i can't remember exactly what i was laughing so much about, i know that the whole mud all over my body and face thing seemed to be really entertaining at the time.

so yesss....i ended up sleeping about 14hrs straight when i got back and then hung out with Riki and Oren for most of Saturday, with a short visit with Safta in the morning as well.

I'm now in Mevasseret with Anati and her kids. The twins are a little obsessed with Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, which i find amusing, and i have to say, i at least think it's more reasonable than say, some GUY MY AGE being obsessed....

last night we had an awesome dinner in Abu Gosh, a small-ish Arab village near here. Dani and Anati go there pretty often and know the guys that own the place. It was cool to hear the guys in the restaurant go back and forth between Arabic and Hebrew and just reinforces my thoughts that if things are to change in the future generations, language is a good place to start. I'm pissed at myself for forgetting the little Arabic that i actually know...but maybe it would come back to me if i actually sat my ass down on a chair and studied...what can i say, my aspirations of being studious and motivated seem to remain aspirations. hopefully i'm not ALL talk though when it comes to this stuff. we'll see.

I was talking to Anati this morning about the twins and how different they are and just how it's amazing (and unfortunate in some respects) how the intifada affects these kids. You don't see it all the time or in everything that they do...but once in a while they will say something or ask something that just reminds you how scared they really are or have been or what not. It'll be interesting to see how this generation feels when they are my age. I guess I will just join the masses and hope that we are actually entering a new phase and that things are changing for the better. but who knows.

Every so often I have these moments when I realize that my mentality and posture and actions are so in the middle. and in the end, i'm never going to be somewhere else but in the middle. Sure, if i am here long enough certain things about me will be "more Israeli" but there's always that "American" somewhere in the middle of it all...how i push myself through the crowd, how i ask for directions, etc. It's funny think that you came to terms with something years and years ago and all of a sudden you realize that's a joke and what you need to come to terms with is the lack of any real conclusion or solution. This is just it and this is me and people will, at least for a good period of time, ask me things in English, or want to explain things to me, or translate when i say i didn't hear them (not that i didn't understand them), and whatever else. Here, I am "the American cousin," and yes, i know i only got here a few months ago so i shouldn't take it personally, i've been "there" wayyy longer than "here" but nevertheless, when where you are starts to feel not so temporary, you kind of hope/expect that the world sees it that way too.

but at the end of the day, i see a picture of myself here and i think, "i look happy..." and I am...and the rest is just the details that i'll ramble on about some other time.