Friday, April 8, 2011

3 AM: Breakup times, new blogs and a typeface conundrum...

Insomnia has been the name of the fame lately. Blurry nights and blurrier days. People tell me I should cave in to the stillnochts. But I don't know. I still doubt it's really a chemical issue, I guess. Currently I'm indulging in nostalgia by way of a Youtube Safari into the golden age of Swedish Hip Hop. Should you wonder what was created under this short period that lasted from around 1994-1998, I recommend having a look at "Blend Dom", by Latin Kings, the group that ushered in said Golden Age.


Other than that I spent the last couple of minutes trying to change the font of my last post, a pome that may not be for eternity, but at the time fairly well captured my thoughts on the emptiness of putting yourself at the center of the world at ever instant. And I can't get this poem to read out in the predefined typeface of this blog, no matter how many times I paste it back and forth from my trusted text editor BBedit. It remains in some screwed up version of Helvetica Bold. Weird is only half of it.

In any case It's been a while since my last update so instead of sleeping I thought I'd through out some action points, a concentrate of the last few weeks. Here we go:


* Purim came and went. I was supposed to go to Raanana for a traditional Purim with the Silbermans, but came the day, I was far to hungover from the previous nights Purim celebrations at the Rabbi to even consider spending 4 hours on a bus back and forth.

* Quentin got a job in a potato processing factory. That may sound high tech but what it actually means is that they bring the industrially harvested potatoes on big trucks, along with soil, stones, branches, worms and the occasional bones from departed animals, and dump all this on big conveyor belts, from which Quentin and his co-slaves are support to sort out the edible stuff an dump the rest. After which they stack the potatoes in large trays, clean them and pack them. All this work is manual and it's 12 hours a day, 68 hours a week, with an hourly salary of 4 bucks. Basically it's a sweatshop exploiting new immigrants.


*The Vibe is finding more and more clients and is spending a lot of time going to and from Tel Aviv, last time around he was at some alternative conference, handing out flyers to interested people and making new contacts. He is looking for an apartment in Tel Aviv, and once there he'll probably get rich in a heartbeat. Half on that town is stressed out of their mind and all of them are alternative, beach-tennis playing hipsters. He should make a killing.

* A new bag of Russians arrived here and some of them started a very loud fight the other day. Fortunately they were too drunk to actually achieve much more that a lot of ruckus.

* It's a sense of breakup here. The Vibe is as mentioned looking to take his Vibrating Spleen to a more appreciative market. Quentin is working around the clock, and me...well I've started to look for work. Living here is sort of a sheltered work shop and I'm starting to get tired of it. Tired of the Cubans who plays Salsa at moron volume ever Shabat, tired of the angry Russians and the tired parents who send their kids out to run riot everywhere because they cant stand having them around in the small apartments. It's time to leave this sheltered existence, to find a place of my own to stay, and most of all to start working. Beside I don't have much choice, I'm starting to run out of money. Who knows, if I don't get lucky I might end up with Quentin and the other minions, sorting potatoes around the clock. I will miss the people here though, and most of all my flat mates. But there is a season for everything. The time for this period of our lives will soon be up.

* The cashiers at Supersol are still inefficient beyond belief. But I no longer think much about it. I've even gotten used to the worthless bus drivers and the omnipresent bureaucratic incompetence. Guess I'm slowly becoming Israeli.

* I started a new blog. About copywriting. If that sounds like you cup of tea, drop by at http://thecoolthecopyandthecontent.blogspot.com/

* The Rabbis set me up on a shidduch (date, sort of). I came by the Rabbis house 2 weeks ago and the Rabbi said he had dreamt about me and this girl. So some back and forth with his wife, him and the Rabbanit put me in a car and drove to the other side of town. Then they told me to wait in the car while they went in and talked to the girls mother. They were gone for about half an hour. Then they came out and told me I was welcome to come in. And so I sit there for half an hour listening to the mother rambling about her dead husband, crying and blowing her nose and showing me a stream of pictures of him and other family members, while the "girl" (a heavyset woman with the charisma of a wrestler), was sitting on a chair a few meters away. All of this in a mix of Hebrew and Moroccan. I hardly understood a word. I did however understand that it was a Rabbinical and Ultra-Orthodox family, and that the "girl" hadn't even finished high school. It as the twilight zone revisited. Fortunately she must have decided against me cause I never heard another word about it.

Well, I guess that sort of sums it up. Now it's 4 AM and I'll see if I can get a couple of hours sleep before it's time for Shul. Laila tov.


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