It’s raining, it’s pouring.
Life isn’t boring.
I’m off for the chance to dance and dance.
Will I get up in the morning?
Yes, rain is pouring down and will apparently continue tomorrow. Here in Israel, we know rain is good. We hope it will fall when we’re tucked up in bed rather than when we have to be outside, but whenever it falls it’s good.
And yes, I’m going to folk dancing this evening, but I’m going by car and we dance in a hall.
I don’t know if there’s ever a “normal” in this country, but the firing has ceased and so has NaNoWriMo. It was my first attempt and I managed 35,044 words.
I didn’t “win”, but I wrote every day and I now have the first draft of a novel I can work with.
In addition, I met some lovely people in Jerusalem who were also doing NaNo.
So I enjoyed the experience and, whatever they say, I feel I’ve won!
This morning, I kept the Internet off so that it wouldn’t disturb me as I wrote. Then I turned it on despite knowing what I’d find. The usual tweets about writing, books, plumbing, birthdays, etc. are interspersed with serious and worrying tweets about things that are going on not a million miles from here. Facebook is just the same.
I can never get my head round this. I can’t concentrate on the usual everyday discussions when I know what else is happening. I’ll probably turn the Internet off again soon. When the background music gets too loud, it’s better to work without it.
Before I turn it off, I want to say something about NaNoWriMo write-ins, of which there have been two so far in Jerusalem.
The first was held in a central café. About eleven people attended, although three of those sat in a different part of the café and didn’t find the others until they left! It wasn’t particularly comfortable balancing our laptops on the little tables, there were not enough electric sockets and we were bothered by cigarette smoke that wafted in from outside. But it was great to meet other writers, discuss our novel-writing progress and write together.
For the second write-in, I invited participants to my house. Only three others came, but again we had a very rewarding time, writing much more than we would have done alone.
I would definitely recommend this activity to anyone who is wondering about joining a write-in. Writing is often a lonely activity. Sometimes that’s good, other times it’s good to get together.
Do you know what our news sounds like? Some of it is like yours. There’s a lot about politics. Elections have just taken place in the US and will shortly take place here. Politicians argue. Crimes are committed. Accidents happen. Sometimes there are even good things on the news, although such reports seem few and far between.
And often, much too often, the newscaster mentions that our neighbours sent over a few rockets. The last statistic I heard was that 50 rockets had fallen since last night. Most of them do not cause injuries, but people have been badly injured by rockets. A million Israelis live under threat of rocket fire from Gaza. When they hear a siren, they have less than a minute to get to the shelter. If they have children, they have to listen to the news to hear whether schools will be open that day. What a way to live!
Those of us who don’t live in those areas are also affected by the news, because we care about our fellow countrypeople. Don’t you? News like that affects what we do and what we say. And so it should.
This post isn’t about taking sides. All I want to say is that people make judgements without knowing the facts. And they shouldn’t.
And the weather news is that winter has finally come to Jerusalem.
On Friday, I took a break from NaNoWriMo to join the second Scavenger Hunt for bloggers, run by Tali Tarlow of Jerusalem Scavenger Hunts.
At the first one, last February, I didn’t really know what to expect and found it hard to join in, so I’m happy to be able to announce that I think I did better this time.
This hunt took place in the area of Nachlaot. I’ve been there many times. I even wrote about it as part of my A-Z blogs about Jerusalem. And yet I hadn’t noticed any of the sites we discovered on Friday.
Tali is excellent at explaining.
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We listened, enthralled.
We formed five groups, and poor Lisa and Robin had to suffer having me in their group for the second time. We were joined by Laura, who was experiencing scavenger hunting for the first time.
We got lost and had to ask several people until we found one who could point us in the right direction.
We saw some interesting places.
And to round off the whole event, we were provided with delicious bread and soup, courtesy of Village Green, 5 Rachel Imeinu Steet.
We didn’t win, but we did better than last time!
Other blogs posts about this event:
Many thanks to Tali and her team for such an interesting and enjoyable morning.
Which means that exactly 36 years ago, I landed at Ben-Gurion Airport, amidst the traditional applause usually heard only on El Al flights, with the intention of making this country my own.
I was excited as I inched along the aisle to the sound of traditional Hebrew songs, and not at all worried. Things would work out, somehow.
And they did. I couldn’t have hoped for more. I’m glad I came and stayed.
It’s good to be back home. It really is. Back to my family, my home.
But. Twenty-five days without news (almost) was great. The news here seems to be designed to make us melancholy.
On top of that, this is a day for remembering. Eleven years ago, I was at work. Someone told me a plane had crashed into a building in New York. I thought it was an accident. On the way back home, it became clear that it wasn’t.
We were on holiday in Ireland when our ten-year-old son announced that Princess Diana had died. “Not possible” was our reaction. We were wrong.
As a child, I was always at home when these things happened. John F Kennedy and his brother. Aberfan. And more. The TV screen didn’t lie.
But I have come across some good news today. About our gold medal in the Paralympics. And about a rather special army officer. They put me in a better mood on this sad day. So does Andy Murray’s well-deserved win, which I stayed up to a rediculous hour to watch.
Boaz, the friendly dance instructor has taught this dance twice recently, so he won’t be teaching it again. He’s also put up a video of it on YouTube.
But I still don’t get part five. It’s hard. And the next folk dancing session is this evening. Oh well…. I’ll fake it as usual.
I hesitate to file this post under Everyday life in Israel. What happened yesterday doesn’t happen every day. Ten years ago, it felt as if it did. Then a fence was built and, without going into a discussion about whether it was good or bad, it cut down on the number of attacks. Considerably.
So now they attack us in other countries.
When these things happen, everyone knows, everyone listens, everyone feels the loss, even if the victims were unknown to them. And everyone continues as usual and pretends everything is normal because there’s no choice. Perhaps, in this country, that is normality.
Oh, and we write about it. We write about trying to be normal, and we write about how a comedian responds. I’m not a comedian and I’ve never made a good job of trying to be normal, but I’m Israeli and I wanted to say something about this attack on this day.
Life is strange. So is language. Stroppy Author and Catdownunder both blogged recently about the lack of words in English to describe a situation that we tend to feel is too hard to talk about. I thought of a word that’s missing in Hebrew: assassination. Perhaps it’s right that it’s missing. A leader who is murdered is a human being. All murders are equally bad. Then I thought of another missing word: bullying. That’s an oversight, in my opinion.
When you leave your country of birth to live in a country where a different language is spoken, things happen with your native tongue. Sometimes you forget words, because you’re more used to saying them in the new language. Sometimes new concepts appear and you hear them only in the new language. Sometimes people in the old country find new ways of saying things and you don’t know them.
For example, when I left Britain, “Oh right,” meant, “Do you know I’d forgotten all about that. Thank you for reminding me.” Or something like that. At some stage, on a visit back to my former home country, I realised its meaning had changed. Now it means, “Oh really? I never knew that.”
For years I felt cut off from the changing language. Now that I’m able to listen to BBC Radio 4, I’m more in touch. I know that young interviewees will start most sentences with the word, “So.” And I’ve finally learnt the expression, “to raise awareness,” which is what I want to do to social anxiety.
But when I asked recently how I should say I have social anxiety and people replied, “I live with social anxiety,” I thought that sounded strange. I thought I’d never heard that use before, but I think I had really. I just hadn’t taken much notice of it and certainly hadn’t taken it on board. It was part of my passive vocabulary – the parts I understand but don’t think of using.
And what’s the point of all this rambling? So (yes, I’m pretending to be young) the other day on Woman’s Hour, I heard this: “I don’t live with HIV; HIV lives with me.”
I let that sentence revolve several times in my brain. What did it mean? What does it mean? I wonder if it’s this: she doesn’t let HIV rule her life; HIV happens to be there, but she ignores it as much as possible and gets on with her life.
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Can I apply that to social anxiety? I don’t think so. It comes up too often; it’s the cause of too many things that I wish were different. But that’s something I can aim for. It sounds much more possible than aiming to get rid of social anxiety.
Miriam Drori, Author