What do you do all day?

I find that I am constantly asked the question, 'But what do you do all day?' This is an understandable question since I went from working full time with a full time social life to being unemployed and living in a deadly boring suburb in the middle of nowheresville. So while I didn't intend for this blog to go into detail about my personal life, I feel that I should let the public know, once and for all, exactly what it is that occupies my days. And the next time anyone asks, I will merely recite the url for this post...which come to think of it, might not be all that much shorter. But anyway, here goes:

Wake up time varies between 8 am and... well, later. 8 am is my wake up time when I'm feeling proactive and energetic, which is roughly once every 2 to 3 months. Most other days I wake up 10, 11... one day I even stayed in bed till 1 pm, and even then it took an air raid siren to get me out of bed. Luckily for me, there's a bed in my safe room.

But don't think I sleep late out of laziness. No, there is a calculated logic to it. If I would wake up early, I would have to turn the dud on (in the winter) and then wait for the water to heat up, which would end up being just as late as if I'd sleep till the sun has been out for long enough to heat the water on its own. It makes perfect sense - to me, anyway.

Next, I go downstairs and no matter whether I happen to be dieting that day or not, breakfast is always pushed off until after I've had my internet fix. First comes e-mail, all 4 email addresses, then comes Facebook. Or, once and while, Facebook then email. Or sometimes even email, facebook, email... I don't really have a set schedule. My Facebook visit usually involves giving the home page a once over and then hitting the refresh button over and over again, willing something to change. Which it usually never does, considering that the rest of the world is fast asleep at that time. Mmm...sleep...

By this time, it's usually about noon and I contemplate going outside, maybe to the grocery store, maybe to the park. Inevitably though, I haven't bothered actually getting dressed, so it becomes a moot point.

So now comes the point in the day where I give my GMAT books a hostile glare, wondering why they have to be sitting on my desk, next to the computer, ruining perfectly good, relaxing computer time by provoking unwarranted pangs of guilt. Why should I feel guilty about wasting time online? I'm not taking the GMAT's for another 3 months...2 months... 4 weeks, with my parents here for 2 of those weeks...

You know what, let's not talk about the GMAT's ok?

Depending on the day of the week, it is then time to download last night's shows. Tuesdays we need to download Privileged, Wednesdays, Gossip Girl, Thursdays, Lost, and Fridays, Ugly Betty. Now, this needs to be done very carefully. The world is full of mean, vicious people who are out to get upstanding, hard working people like myself. This means I need to sit there, sifting through the pile of fakes, passwords and viruses, till I find the real show to download. See, watching tv IS work.

By this time, the day has started for folks overseas and various friend's screennames begin appearing on my buddylist, as they sign on first thing upon arriving at work. They work very hard.

The rest of the day passes quickly enough, chatting, refreshing and studiously avoiding looking at my GMAT book (damn peripheral vision!).

And then in the evenings, I relax. I unwind from a long stressful day, usually with a movie or a good book.

Offers of employment are more than welcome.

Anything America Does, Israel Can Do Stupider

I would like to preface this post with the following disclaimer. I do not hate Israel. I think it is a lovely country with many excellent aspects. That said, however, I do think the bulk of its population, is made up of complete morons.

Example #1: The board members of large companies, in this case, Superbus

Israeli busses have always relied on a system of punch cards, whereby you hand your card to the bus driver, who reaches down, picks up his whole puncher, peers at your card trying to determine where exactly there is a free space to punch, and then finally punches a hole in it, all the while careening at breakneck speed along a windy road on the side of a dangerously steep cliff. But that's not even what I'm talking about.
Enter onto the scene, a new bus company, Superbus. The wave of the future, the new Superbus busses actually have something resembling a metrocard. Imagine that! 'Israel is finally catching up to the 21st century,' we all exclaimed.
I should have remembered my long-held opinion of the Israeli business model before getting all excited.

Let me explain to you how this new Superbus card works.
First of all, G-d forbid there should be card terminals where you can buy these cards, like the metrocard machines in the States. No, you have to go down to a Superbus office, during regular office hours (when most people are at work) and buy a card. And when I say 'buy a card,' I mean pay for the actual piece of plastic. Yup, you pay for the privilege of merely carrying these cards. But, that's not stupidity per se, that's just greed. Which is ok. After all, these new bus cards are going to change the face of Israeli bussing forever more. Busses will be safer, faster, and more efficient. Right? Wrong. Allow me to continue. So you load money on the card,(we'll leave out the technical details of acheiving that feat), you get on the bus... AND YOU HAND YOUR CARD TO THE BUS DRIVER. You're probably shaking your head and thinking you must have read that sentence wrong. Or maybe she mis-typed. (No, you Israeli board member- I typed it in caps on purpose.) Hand the card to the bus driver? Whatever for? Why can't you just swipe it?
Well, I'll tell you why. Because the bus driver must swipe it. Yup, he takes the card from you (just like he used to take the little punchy card), swipes it, and then waits for a little receipt to be printed that tells you how much money is on your card. And all this in twice as much time as it would have taken him to punch your card on the old busses. But this is progress - Israeli style. Need I say more?

"Because They Need Me."

We bumped into an old friend of my husband's the other night. A former resident of New York, he had recently made aliyah and joined the Israeli army. Awestruck, I asked if he had been in Gaza, to which he replied in the affirmative.
This brought back memories of my seminary days, when my friends and I had always been overly impressed with the soldiers... especially if they were cute and our age. But, older and slightly wiser as I am now, I was impressed for a completely different reason. The young man told us that he had originally enlisted for six months but had just signed up for another two years. "Why?" I asked.
"Because they need me."
I was astonished by the sheer simplicity of his words. His country needs him and so he'll serve. No questions asked. No complaining that he'd rather get on with the rest of his life. This young man was going to dedicate two years of his prime, two years when most guys his age are finishing up college and starting new jobs, to protect his country. That, I thought, is the epitome of selflessness.

Badatz Bus

I usually try to avoid putting myself in a situation where I'll need to take a Mehadrin bus. Touchy subject, those busses. While I most certainly am not going to condone such apartheid behavior by actually sitting in the back like they intend, I also would rather not offend anyone's delicate sensibilities by sitting in the front. So when the 418 pulls up to the bus stop, I suddenly become very busy with an important text message, some dirt on my skirt, or studying one of the numerous flyers that coat the walls of Israeli bus stops. (I acutally saw them putting those up once. Very cool, but that's a story for a different time.)

Anyway, a friend of mine happened to be on one of the Jerusalem intra-city Mehadrin busses recently. I don't know why she chose to ride this bus but I'm assuming it was the best option to take her where she was going. It was an accordion bus and relatively empty, so she sat down towards the back of the front section. Only a few minutes had passed when a teenage boy comes over to her and starts yelling at her to get up and move to the back. She diplomatically ignored him and stared out the window. He wouldn't relent, though. Every couple of minutes he would turn around tell her she shouldn't be sitting there.

Here she paused her story to remark that if this boy was so worried about seeing a woman on his side of the bus, his best option was probably not to keep turning around and talking to her. But that's neither here nor there.

Finally, she had enough of his constant harrassment, and, since her stop was coming up, got up and stood next to the door. Immediately, the teenage boy slid into her vacated spot.
Empty as the bus was, this puzzled my friend and she leaned over and asked the boy, lama ata lo yachol lashev sham, o sham, o sham? 'Why can't you sit there, or there?'

He didn't answer.

As the bus pulled up to her stop, she leaned over one more time. "You know, I'm pregnant and you just made me get up for you." And she promptly got off the bus.

Upon hearing this story, all I could say was, well done, friend. Well done.

Eretz Nehederet is my new hero.

On Holidays, Vacation days and Plato

Today is Martin Luther King day. A national holiday. While talking to my mom, she mentioned that she enjoys holidays so much more than regular vacation days. I told her that this is because holidays are like having store credit. It's already built in. Nothing to gain by not taking advantage. Taking a vacation day is like actually spending money to buy something. You have to think twice... maybe you'll save it for a different occasion. Unless, of course, you're a total spendthrift, spending money like water- or store credit. Then this simile would not apply to you. In fact, maybe I'm onto something here. Maybe there's a correlation between how quick people are to spend money and how often they take a vacation day... In-depth study to follow.

Another thing about holidays- they're so much better when you have a job. Unemployment is great, (except for the money issue- but that's just a minor technicality) but you don't get to experience the excitement that comes with having that one day off. I noticed something similar as I was getting into bed one night. As I pulled the covers over me and felt the cold of the stone room recede before the warmth of my blanket, I was struck by how nice it was to get warm. And, tired as I was, as I drifted off to sleep, I thought how very wonderful sleep is, especially when you're so tired. It seemed more profound at the time, probably due to the aforementioned tiredness. When I mentioned it to my husband, however, he pointed out that Plato already came to that conclusion a couple thousand years ago.

"Pure pleasure then is not the absence of pain, nor pure pain the absence of
pleasure; although most of the pleasures which reach the mind through the body
are reliefs of pain, and have not only their reactions when they depart, but
their anticipations before they come." Plato, The Republic

Came to that conlcusion and then refuted it, or so it seems from my brief Google search. But then again, what does Plato know?

The Wonderful Reality of the Work From Home Phenomenon

Let me preface this by saying that I do not intend to rant.

That said, can anyone explain to me what exactly this 'work from home' business is all about? Or, to be more precise, this 'work from home' scamusiness? Ok, so I think I have just enough brain cells to figure out that if a company is asking me to pay THEM to hire me, they're either lame enough to think I'm actually that desperate... or they're lame enough to think I'm lame enough to actually believe that after I've been lame enough to hand my money over to them, they'll be lame enough to turn around and suddenly start giving me money. Which is just lame all around.

But what about those that advertise that they're legitimate. Which, in itself is slightly sketchy. You don't hear Macy's advertising that their a legitimate department store. But that's beside the point. I've been to company websites where the entire website is created for the jobseeker. In fact, the company claims to have been created with the sole purpose of providing jobs for people who want to work at home. I imagine their mission statement reads something like this: "This company's main goal is to provide jobs to people who would like to work at home. What kind of jobs? We are not sure. Where the money to pay them will come from, we're also not sure. What exactly does this company do? Why, we've already told you - we create jobs for people who want to work from home."

And then there are the transcription jobs - which, admittedly, actually sound like something that could feasibly be done from home. Yet, I've applied for those. After taking a test that resembles the English section on the SAT's, they send you an apologetic letter, stating that your command of the English language just isn't good enough for this kind of job. Now, I have this crazy idea in my head that I actually have a pretty good command of this wonderful language. And I did pretty darn well on the English section of the SAT's back in high school. But, I guess I must understand that this job does involve listening to an audio file and typing exactly what you hear, which, of course, only someone with a phD in English can possibly do. Oh, and salary requirements over $14 an hour will not be considered at this time.

Did I say I wasn't going to rant?

Mandatory Intro

What would a blog be without the standard, 'I am creating a blog' introduction. To be completely honest, I've always been of the opinion that unless you are a complete genius with pearls of wisdom to share, without which the world at large would suffer tremendously and possibly be plunged back into the dark ages, or you lead a ridiculously exciting life involving snowball fights with panda bears in the arctic circle and diving for hidden treasures off the coast of Africa... I forgot the beginning of my sentence by now. Oh, right. So unless one belongs to either of the 2 categories above, I don't believe one should start a blog. Because, quite frankly, who cares? Nobody but you and possibly your closest friends are interested in your personal life and if you're blogging about news and politics... well, see sentence #2 for my opinion on that matter.

But I guess what it all boils down to is that the Internet is not a notebook or a file cabinet, and therefore, we don't have to worry about it running out of space when cluttered up with junk. People can add whatever content or not-content they'd like and if you, or me in this case, don't want to read it, no one's forcing it down your throat. So, on that note, I am throwing my blog out there into cyberspace to be read or not read at humanity's discretion.