Before I apologize for not having updated in a month and a half, let me just explain that this post might be slightly...colored by the fact that I am currently coked out of my skull on Tylenol.
Which by the way, is completely useless when my tonsils are bleeding. Again. Actually, I think I never really got over the original infection back in December. The penicillin knocks it out for a while and then it realizes, "Hey, we're in a country which is a forerunner in the race for Who Can Use Their Antibiotics In The Stupidest Way Possible By Not Completing the 10-Day Course But Rather As Soon As We Begin Feeling Better We Stop Taking The Meds And Save Them For Later Because Drug Immunity, What's That?". Soon to be showing Thursdays, on Fox, 8/7 central. For such a technologically advanced society, why do Israelis have to be such dumbasses about antibiotics? Was the entire nation dropped on their head as children? Is that like a new custom to make a vast majority too stupid to actually listen to the doctor when he says "finish the damn course, even if you feel better half way through". Attn Israel: the bacteria can become a super-germ immune to whatever you stopped taking which will then infect unsuspecting foreigners who don't have immunities to your super-germs and who stay awake all night spitting up pus and mucus and blood into the sink for the third #%$^ing time this year, which is three #%$^ing times too many.
Hebrew 101: "I didn't sleep all night because I was spitting up pus and blood into the sink" in Hebrew is "לא ישנתי כי ירקתי מוגלה ודם בכיור כל הלילה ". (pronounced: lo yashanti ki yarakti muglah ve dam ba ki-or kol halayla"
Learn a new thing every day.
So for those who haven't lost their lunch at this point, here's the breakdown of events since I last posted, as far as I can remember them while on a Tylenol high.
January 30th: I write a stupidly easy Lexicology exam, for which I prepared not knowing it would be stupidly easy, and as the only native speaker of English in the class, part of me feels bad for thinking it was stupidly easy when I know the rest of the class struggles to formulate a coherent sentence on paper, but a bigger and much more influential part of me feels AMAZING cause I got 100% in the course, bitches! Sweet.
January 31st: I skipped the Semantics exam. Fun Israeli custom! Moed Bet: (or "the second date", literally) Because Israeli men who served in the army are often called for reserve duty, or miluim, even though they may be in university, Moed Bet was set up so that those who had miluim or other conflicts could get a chance to write the exam if the first date didn't work out. It should be mentioned that my school is nearly 50% Israeli Arab, who don't serve in the IDF and therefore aren't called for miluim, 25% Israeli Jewish women, who aren't called back for miluim (except in extremely rare cases), and 25% Israeli Jewish men, most of whom will probably never have to serve miluim. So, thanks to a marginalized minority of students, everyone is entitled to a rewrite of an exam, because they had miluim, some other conflict, or just want to improve their Moed Alef mark. Which is very nice, considering that every other university on the planet has managed to work out exam scheduling conflicts without giving the rest of the students a retake. Also, if you get a poor mark the first time, tough. You should have studied harder.
Which is why I'm going to skip ahead to February 22nd, where I took Semantics during the scheduled Moed Bet time and didn't do so hot because I was lazy and didn't study enough. Which is my own fault, which is why I'm not going to go whining to the English Department to grant me a moed gimel. I actually don't know how well I did or didn't do, because the marks aren't posted yet. But whatever.
Back to January 31st: Instead of juggling my huge over-packed suitcases on a bus then on a train to the airport, I opted to call a taxi to take me all the way to Tel Aviv. He was very punctual, which was great, except what was not great was that he took the fast route down the mountain to the highway, which involves going through the unlit back roads of Usufiyya. In the dark. At night. Unlit. Back roads.
Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy!
Girls, next time, just say no. Take the main road and suck it up.
I got to the airport, met up with Yael who was going with me to Toronto, checked in the bags after being hassled by the check in guy, who seriously needs to take a laxative. My carry on was 8 pounds overweight, and Yael's very full backpack was 8pounds under the limit. So I yanked out my heavy horrible laptop which should die a painful death because I said so, unzipped Yael's backpack, lay the laptop precariously on top of her stuff which was bursting at the seams, and the guy reweighed it. "Fine," he grunted "but don't put anything more in your carry-on".
Yeah, right. I'm going to let the laptop just chill out on top of an unzipped backpack. Cause that's totally secure. Idiot. As soon as we were out of his sight, I transferred the laptop back into my bag. And wonder of wonders, the plane didn't crash. Crazy. Who would have thought that my 8 extra pounds would threaten the security of the multi-tonne plane? Also, what happens if a passenger is like, really really fat? Are they allowed to bring a carry-on? Or does the check-in guy say "Sorry ma'am. You're just too damn fat. You can only pack the carry-on if you let us saw off one of your limbs. But we here at El-Al are into customer service, so you can pick the limb. And now don't you go trying to repack that limb! We'll know".
The plane was less than stellar, even though they had real live silverware, which was awesome. It was one of those old planes, with the tv screen way up at the front, while we were way up in the back (way down in the back?), behind a man who apparently always reads his newspaper while holding his arms straight out and then lifting them 45 degrees upwards so that it just blocks my view of the onflight movies, which were crap, anyways.
Thank god I like airplane food.
February 1st-15th: I chilled out in Toronto, had massive amounts of Chinese food, went to Emma's batmitzvah, went shopping, y'all, went to Kingston and signed an apartment with Rohini and Alex S, (It's gorgeous. I love it. Nothing bad can be said about my gorgeous loveable apartment. So shut up) and flew back to Israel.
February 18th: I took the Hebrew placement test...again. They don't change it, so I remembered most of it from way back in September. I tried meeting the new people, but it should be easier once it's beach weather and we can all chillz in bathing suits and get to know eachother better while soaking up the carcinogenics in the form of UV rays and beer. Beer is probably a carcinogenic. It should be, anyways.
February 22nd: Disastrous Semantics exam. Oy.
February 28th: I didn't take the Morphology in Moed Aleph, because I was in Toronto, but I went to check the grades on the English Department bulletin board, to gauge how difficult the exam (which I would be taking March 2nd) might be. Everyone who is registered for the course is posted, whether or not they wrote the first exam. Except apparently for me. Which means that I would not have been allowed to write the second exam. I frantically called the departmental secretary, explained the situation, and waited on pins and needles while she typed stuff into the computer. At first, she was convinced that I was not registered for the course, which was wrong, because a month ago i dragged my paranoid self to the English department to make sure that I was registered for all my courses and sure enough, a month ago I was registered. She checked again, and it turns out that yes, I was registered for the course, but since my name is last on the list, and therefore on the second page of the attendance sheet, the teacher forgot to submit page two, leaving me unregistered for the exam.
Awesome. Two days to go to the exam, and it is by complete dumb luck that I happen to bring it to their attention that I really have to get exam-registered so I can just get it over with.
Why does everything have to be such a three-ring circus in this country? Can't we just work stuff out efficiently? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh.
March 2nd: I wrote the Morphology exam, thank God, and I think I did okay, but I'll know only as soon as the marks are posted sometime later this week.
March 3rd: I went to Jerusalem to visit with cousins. I had a nice shabbat dinner, went out with Michal and her friends, and went to bed at a wonderfully unseemly hour. Saturday, I went to go visit Karin who was touring the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with her friends, which was great, because while I have often been outside the Church, I always seem to be too inappropriately dressed to ever have made it inside.
I still didn't make it inside. I got lost in the Arab market. Which by the way, has no cellphone reception. (which strikes me as a mild security issue, but whatever). I finally found the right way, but they had finished with the Church and gone on to the Western Wall, so I met up with Karin in the Church's courtyard and we headed out for the world's most expensive lunch at a restaurant outside the Jaffa market, one of the most tourist-trappy places in the world. But we were hungry. Which was surprising, considering that we walked through the butchers' district to get back to the outside of the market, where all the cows and ducks and chickens and sheep are sleeping upside down and inside out. And what I love is that right next door to the slaughtered sheep store is a yarn store. They use the whole sheep.
How very environmentally conscious! But I was too grossed out to stop for very long, because in the butchers' district, there's always wet something on the floor that you're stepping in, and if you pause for too long, you get to thinking about what the wet something actually is.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwww.
Which brings us full circle to last night, where i didn't sleep at all, because yarakti muglah vedam bakior kol halayla.
And I'm off to my first ever university course in Hebrew (Introduction to Semitic Linguistics, or Mavo La Balshanut Shemit) armed with a tape recorder and a drug-induced smile.
