Over 8 months in already (time flies when you’re working your ass off!), and I’ve finally gotten my corporal stripes. They’re so new I haven’t even sewn them on yet, as you can see.

I’ve been taking rather more pleasure than I ought to in signing my name as a corporal instead of a private over the last couple days.

In any case, I decided two weeks ago that I am not signing on for extra, ever (not even for the officer’s course, which I am now almost sure I don’t want). So: less than one year and 4 months left!

What I did last weekend:

• Ohad Khitman concert
• Mira Awad & Ahinoam Nini concert (I have been waiting to go to a Mira Awad concert for months and months now, and it totally met all my expectations. Also: front row seats!!!)
• Shopping. Lots and lots of shopping.
• Visited the National Library for the first time in months – I keep making new discoveries every time I visit.
• More shopping! New clothes – yay!
• Finally saw HP6! Would probably have been able to absorb it better if I hadn’t been sitting next to two fangirl friends (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!) who kept laughing every time something with slashy undertones happened on screen. Which was, um, THE WHOLE MOVIE. But hey – more fun this way. ^^

What I did this weekend:

• Night shift
• Day shift
• More night shifts
• Read about 400 pages of Carol Berg’s Lighthouse books (one bright spot, at least – I’m finally reading Breath and Bone)
• Sorted my email (only 10 mails in my inbox! This is a record, people!)

Yes, you tell me which sounds more fun.

I’ll confess to being foolishly excited when I saw front page on Sunday, the day before I went back to base:

What a relief that I sent my report off this afternoon and will get at least six hours tonight! (When that seems like luxury, you know something is seriously wrong.)

If I have to look at one more news article, I’m going to shoot someone. Probably myself. (<< *is joking. Mostly*)

• an antibiotics prescription (finally!) after a month of negative tests, misdiagnosis and suffering. (Army medical system = FAIL.)

• a new phone that has:
  • a touch screen
  • a camera
  • user-friendly, very fast internet
  • good speakers
  • great design
  • lots of general shininess and features I haven’t even started to explore yet (tv channels! Unlimited viewing time for $6 a month!). This is the first time in my life that my phone isn’t at least thee years behind the herd, and I have to say – it feels really good.

• an official email from one’s division commander (who is a general and two ranks below the Chief of Staff, and for whom one has a great amount of personal respect), sent to the entire branch, praising a weekly report one started and has been in charge of writing ever since.

These past two weeks have been intense, strange, awesome and more interesting than any other period in my service so far. This is not just because of external events that touched on my work (though there were certainly enough of those) but also because personal, internal developments. After this past week and a half, I think I can finally say that I’m getting the hang of this job. At the risk of jinxing myself – I feel ready to take on almost anything it can throw at me.

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!