Like these last few days.

From Haaretz:

A Lebanese lieutenant colonel has gone missing, and military officials there as well as the officer’s family believe he fled to Israel after coming under suspicion of spying for Israeli intelligence.

Daher Jarjoui, a resident of the southern Lebanese village of Qlayaa, was the Lebanese Armed Forces’ liaison with a Spanish company in the UN peacekeeping force along the Israeli border.

Basically, he had the same job I do, in the Lebanese army instead of the IDF, talking to the same UN liaison officers that I talk to. (He’s a colonel. I’m a private. I’ll let the facts speak for themselves about the level of rank inflation over there.)

Would it be terribly undiplomatic to pump the UN liaison officers for information?

Probably.

I really have no excuse for neglecting my lj like this, except for the fact that everything funny, interesting or at all entertaining that’s been happening to me is classified. Ever since I enlisted, I’ve found it hard to talk to anyone out of the army because my focus has narrowed so much that it’s difficult to talk about anything not military – something I need to make more of an effort to fix.

My job is interesting – stressful and irritating, yes, but at least I feel like I’m doing something, most of the time.

Even if a significant part of my work today had to do with a dead cow.

Don’t ask.

…but I do suck at keeping a blog.

I can’t even say that I have an excuse aside from the fact that professionally, I’ve more than passed the point where I can’t talk about what I’m doing, and personally… well, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t want to. It’s depressing enough to live it and think about it, let alone write it.

It’s not that my situation is all that unpleasant. I’m on the most interesting border (and in this country that’s saying a lot), on the base everyone in the course wanted to get to, the one I figured I didn’t have much of a chance of getting. But I did, through pure blind luck – I was supposed to go to Allenby Bridge, on the Jordanian border, but it turned out last minute that they needed a guy there. So they switched me with one of the few guys graduating the course with me, and I ended up in the north.

I don’t know what’s up with the people who are in my unit with me, but there are very few of them I feel a real connection with. During the course, it took me about a month to figure out that I was miserable. Why? I had hardly anyone to talk to. I found it almost impossible to join a casual conversation. Every time I made some sort of remark, tried to join in – it crashed and burned. Not that anyone was hostile to me, merely indifferent.

I knew from the beginning that it was my fault – if I tried harder, made more of an effort to be sociable, it would work out. But when I kept trying and failing, I just drew into myself further and further, half-hoping for someone to notice and ask if I were okay or something, but I waited and it didn’t happen. I eventually came to the conclusion that no one was paying attention.

Basic training was not this bad. High school was not this bad. Hell, none of the schools I’ve ever been to (and I’ve been to lots) were this bad. Every other framework I’ve been in, I felt that I at least had the potential to fit in if I’d make the effort. Here in my unit, with the very people I should have the most in common with, I can’t manage to conduct a simple conversation without feeling like I’m pulling teeth – mine and theirs. It was like that in the course, and it’s like that here on base, and I have no idea how to fix it.

Add the facts that the training is grueling, the weather is freezing, the rooms are crowded, there’s no privacy, and that the prospect of the actual work is terrifying…

Well, here I am, sitting at the keyboard on the last night of my weekend off, desperately wanting not to go back tomorrow morning.

At home on a weekend off, and I’ve been trying to catch up on email and comments in my meager internet time. I’m about three months behind on both. If I don’t reply to you, it’s either because I didn’t have time or because I missed your comment. So just in case – thanks for all the good wishes and support! It makes me feel a lot better to know that people out there are thinking about me.

I just set an account up on LoudTwitter, in the hopes that I’ll figure out a way to post tweets from my phone. If I don’t, and if it spams your flists with empty posts anyway, sorry in advance.

A little more about what’s going on with my military career – I’m almost a month into my course; most of the way through. I’ll be under one of two branches in the Strategic Brigade – either Foreign Military Cooperation or the Liaison office. The former involves sitting in Tel Aviv and coordinating things with foreign military representatives and the latter involves sitting on the border (or in one of the three regional HQs) and doing the same thing. Am hoping for the latter, mostly because the five hour daily commute between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv would kill me, and the alternatives aren’t that attractive. Plus, who wants to live with their parents when they’re in the army? Not me.

We get our assignments in a week and a half, at the end of the course – fingers crossed.

[Originally posted on lj]

Believe it or not, it actually wasn’t that bad. I got incredibly lucky in a number of different ways:

• Instead of doing level 02 basic training like I was supposed to do, I got sent to level 01, which is considerably easier. I have no idea why (it wasn’t just me – my entire company was also supposed to do 02), but I wasn’t exactly asking too many questions.
• I did my basic training in Mahaneh 80 (”Camp 80″) which is up in the north, near Caesarea. Because it’s near the coast, it’s actually much warmer than Jerusalem (meaning, it’s very pleasant in December). More significantly, it’s not the Zikkim base, which has been under rocket fire for years – especially this last week, as you can probably imagine.
• All the girls in my platoon were nice. Being stuck together with bitchy girls can really make boot camp suck, but I got along with everyone there. Not only that, girls kept talking about how nice I was, which is pretty much a first. I kept telling them, “I’m bitchy in English! Really!”

I expected to have more problems than I did, whether in accepting military authority or in falling asleep at night in a room shared with five other girls, or with the Hebrew. But to my surprise, I slept like a log, and was repeatedly informed that my ugly, obnoxious American accent is actually cool (no accounting for taste, I guess).

And as for the military authority – I found that it’s actually quite easy to show respect to one’s superiors if one, well, respects them. Take my sergeant, for example, who never smiled but was secretly incredibly nice, not to mention very professional. Or my platoon commander, who’s aggressively, scarily and extremely competent. I want to be her when I grow up – and she’s only about two years older than I am.

I can’t quite say that I enjoyed it – six hours of sleep a night, with what seemed like at least as much time spent standing at attention during the day is not all that fun – but I’ll really miss the people there. Commanding officers included.

* * *

And in another instance of what may or may not have been luck, I didn’t get sent down south to help on the Gaza border. At least two platoons from our base were sent, more or less at random – one of girls exactly like us, whose company was on base the Saturday the war started, and the other from the company in the dorms right across from ours (which at least meant less boys watching us undress through the windows).

I actually wanted to get sent – still do – because I hate feeling useless, especially when I feel that I should be doing something. It’s a little scary down there, yes, but civilians are living under these conditions – some of them for years. Not to mention what the people in Gaza themselves are going through now. I’m a soldier – shouldn’t I be helping already?

Even though we were in the north, the war wasn’t that far off. There were at least three instances of attempted kidnappings right outside the base this last week – one involving a girl from my own company. You can all probably imagine that we’re been going around with our little army-issue bottles of tear gas in our jacket pockets, rather than at the bottom of our bags like we did the first weekend off base.

(This post was originally meant to reassure you, believe it or not…)

I’m reporting to army HQ in Tel Aviv tomorrow morning. My course is (according to rumor) supposed to start a week from then, on a completely different base, so I guess the plan is to have me serve coffee or something until then. Here’s hoping they don’t screw up and stick me doing that for my entire service… I can think of better ways to spend two years.

Wish me luck!

I took a walk across the valley tonight, from my house to the old city. I’d just come in through Jaffa Gate when I noticed that something was going on. At first I thought it was a bomb scare – crowds of people were by-standing, and there was a unusually large number of police around, among the crowd and in the street directing traffic. But then one of the shopkeepers said that there was a movie being filmed – and that’s when I noticed the cameras, lights, etc.

…Yeah, shaddup. It was night. And they were unobtrusive cameras and lights, okay?

One of the extras (a Palestinian in a Border Guard uniform – took me a couple minutes to realize that no, the army wasn’t going quite that far with its affirmative action program) said that it was some kind of detective movie, which explained the presence of all the people in police uniforms. I approached one of the people who seemed to know what was going on. He turned out to be Israeli – a local crew member. Here is (more or less) how the conversation went:

Me: What’s it about?

Him: Oh, it’s a German made-for-tv adaptation of some book by Batya Gur *.

Me: Oooh! Oooh! Which one?

Him: Murder on Bethlehem Road.

Me: Squeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! **

Him: Do you know it?

Me: Omg yes I love it its my favorite book ever omfg I can’t believe they’re making a movie out of it!!!!!!!1!!111!!1 *** So… the policewoman at the table is… lemmee guess… Tzilla?

Him: Yes. And the guy next to her, the balding one – *points to middle aged, very German-looking guy with grey hair, and not very much of it either* – is Ohayon.

Me: … No, he’s not.

Okay, okay, I didn’t actually say it. But I thought it.

Let me explain.

Michael Ohayon is the protagonist of a series of detective novels by Israeli author Batya Gur. He’s a police inspector and a likable, complex character. He is also very, very attractive. (Let’s just say that if he actually existed, I’d be faxing in my request for a transfer from my wonderful hopefully-future unit to the Jerusalem police force like that. No, scratch that. I’d be camping out on the local recruitment office’s doorstep until they agreed to transfer me.)

Mmmmmmm.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Ahem. Anyway, Ohayon is, among other things, Sephardic (Moroccan, to be specific), which plays a part both in his character and in the plot of the books. In Murder on Bethlehem Road the point is particularly important, as the book’s major theme is the conflict between Ashkenazim (Jews from Europe) and Sephardim (Jews from Arab countries). There’s some disgusting stuff going on here that doesn’t make the international news – lots of prejudice against Sephardim. That Jews should be racist, not just against, say, Arabs or Africans, but against other Jews is the height of hypocrisy. (Not to say that it’s worse than any other kind of racism, just more ridiculous.) It’s better these days, but still exists. And that’s what the book is ultimately about.

So it’s sort of a shame that they cast someone ethnically German (definitively Ashkenazi) as Ohayon rather than someone, well, darker – and in doing so lost a large part of that particular subtext.

Anyway, I hope the guy is a good actor because I am totally getting it on dvd whenever it comes out.  Because out of every movie it could possibly have been, this would have been my first choice, I love those books so much.  Can life get any more awesome than this – not only finding out that my favorite detective novel’s being turned into a movie, but to also stumble over them filming it?

I might even be in it. I was convinced to walk back and forth with the extras a few times… making me really wish that I’d thought to wear my nice jacket and to put my hair up. Oh well. My aura of unfashionableness didn’t stop one of the cute assistants from flirting with me and asking for my number, though. *g*

…

It’s a particularly odd kind of meta standing and watching an actor play a character, especially a character you’re attached to. A character in a book or a movie is a character, yes, and the actor is their own person – even if the two do share a face (or, in this case… don’t really). It’s relatively easy to keep the two separate.  But watching an actor be a character right in front of you… it’s a strange feeling.

* Probably my favorite Israeli author Evar. She wrote this series of amazing mystery novels, set right here in my hometown. Most of the action of this particular one takes place actually in my neighborhood.

** No, not out loud. Well, not quite.

*** Dialogue slightly embellished for dramatic purposes.

I hear that people in the US are suffering from election withdrawal.  I understand completely – you spend almost two years rooting for an underdog candidate, only to see him win by a landslide.  Total anticlimax.  The bastard didn’t even have the consideration to leave any suspense – no recounts, no fraud, not even any quibbles over the voting machines.

Thankfully, American voters do not have this problem here in Israel.  Our government has considerately arranged for a series of elections to gently wean us off our addiction.  Just today, for instance, I had the privilege of voting for a right-wing, secular thug over a right-wing, Ultra-Orthodox thug in the Jerusalem municipal elections.  And come February, I get to vote in the national parliamentary elections too.

(Yes, Tzipi, I know you say that you only had them call the national elections because you couldn’t bring the Shas party into the coalition.  But we know better, and we’re grateful.)

The future is looking bright and filled with plenty of fliers, graphs and opinion polls.

Ever since I moved to Israel at the age of nine, I’ve been wanting to go back home.

I can’t even begin to explain what a wonderful feeling it is to know that “home” still exists.

Authors Steven Brust (of the excellent Vlad Taltos series), Kit O’Connell and Reesa Brown, along with a team of co-contributors, are in the process of launching an alternate reality fiction project.

As with Shadow Unit, a similar project, the authors will be releasing pieces of fiction set in the world while letting readers interact with the characters online. But they’re going one step further than Shadow Unit and actively encouraging reader contributions (fiction, merchandise, related websites and more) to the world – which are accepted as canon if they fit the rest of it.

Since the project is released under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license, other people can actually market and sell related content and merchandise that they create themselves. One of the creators’ goals is to figure out ways to make this project earn money for them and for the other contributors.

Right now the project is just starting. The first piece of fiction is slated to go online in a couple weeks or so, and the authors are planning to release a wiki of information about the world’s canon in a couple months. This is a great time to get involved in the project from the very beginning. You can already start talking to the characters over on the Port Outreach blog.

• The central site with out-of-character information, including a newsletter, is up at continuouslabs.com.
• The in-world blog is up here.

There’s also a related Twitter feed and a website for an in-world music venue.

19/10/08: Edited to clarify.