Category: Blather

You should make your blog more interesting, my brother said, like write about your life instead of posting stupid links.
Except, he says, you should change things a little, so that if someone gets insulted, you can deny you wrote about them, like you could say, no, it wasn’t you, I meant some other brother I have…
Had the pleasure of being woken up by a call from Aya, who heard I was looking for her from Avner, who read it in my blog.
Which would be ironic, except that I think that was my point.
Made Schnitzels, and got to eat them in good company. Also, had my fingers mangled by a struggling dog (they were caught hooked in its collar when it decided to do backflips to shake me loose) and was startled to be asked by my nephew to wipe his bottom (my alarm was unfounded).

Trying to contact someone by phoning them at home: What a bloody primitive 20th century way of communicating.
And since this is Aya, who is not someone I call regularly, and since I have no “business” excuse to call her, there is a certain awkwardness to this. So I rehearse what to say to the answering machine, and as I dial I also think of an opening line if she answers herself.
But then her mom picks up.
(at least I think it was her mom. It certainly sounded like a mom.)
Out, maybe back in the morning, leave a message? Err, no, thanks. Ulp.
Of course by the time I get myself to call the next day she’s already left, and I get the mom again.
What have I learned from this? That he who doesn’t leave a message the first time loses twice:
First, his message is delayed by yet another day, and second, he really has to go through the awkwardness of actually leaving a message, just to prove (if only to himself) that he wasn’t intimidated to do so the first time.
Ah. I also had an observation about people without mobile phones, which are rapidly turning out to be the 21st century’s equivalent of people who live without electricity or running water. It’s that they choose to spend time with the people who are actually there rather than with the people who aren’t.
Another observation is that all these people (Aya, Tarzan, etc.) don’t have cars. A mobile phone is a lifesaver when your transportation is something as unreliable as my own car, which broke down three times in three weeks this September.

Friday morning, I took Suzie to the airport. So it ends, and we begin again.

Suzie and I were together for nine years. When we met, I was living at my parents, studying Biology, writing in a newspaper. She was married (with an adult daughter living at home), studying history, editing and writing in the same newspaper.

She was my first real girlfriend.

I got my own place so I could be with her. I got a job so I could get a place so I could be with her. For nine years, she was the most important person in the world to me, and the closest.

Now she’s gone, to Switzerland, where she will write the next chapter of her life, and the apartment is still filled with the shed skin of her previous life, her life with me. The nails in the walls, bits of laundry and cosmetics, cats (Three in the house, with me, Twenty five in the yard, in the next-door neighbour’s care). Potted plants. Her name on the door.

I can’t really tell the story of my life with Suzie, and if I tried to I probably couldn’t stop. I should say that the break-up was friendly, that we both had a lot of time to adjust to the idea, which explains why I’m so muted about it, and that we still love each other. She is the most remarkable woman I have ever met.

I don’t post too much personal stuff to my blog, both because it actually requires me to write something (rather than just re-posting a link). When I do, it’s more often than not a passing thought rather than mentioning anything concrete connected to my life. But there are things I really ought to mention, and I’m alone, for the first time in a decade is probably one of them. So this is a heads-up notice and an obvious cheap plea for sympathy. I’d be grateful if the aforementioned sympathy wouldn’t be in the form of a comment such as:

1. Gee, I’m sorry.
2. See, now you can enjoy the perks of being alone (I’ve already practiced this for a couple of months, thanks. Mostly, it sucks).
3. So, now you can go about pursuing your reproductive destiny.
4. Well, I never really liked her anyway.

On the other hand, company, affection, and offers to adopt a cat would be very nice to have. I also have lots of things (some of them Suzie’s, like oil paints and boards, some of them mine, like comics and books, a computer monitor or two) that I would like to sell or give away. Come over and take a look.

So we end, and so I begin.

Hebrew first:

בשבוע שעבר היינו בסרט, ובועז, שמעורה בתרבות הנוער העכשווית, סיפר לנו שיש מונח סלנג חדש עבור בחורה שווה.
סבירה
וואו. אמרתי אני לא מאמין. הצליחו למצוא משהו עוד יותר מעליב מ"כוסית".

Now, let’s pretend non-Hebrew speakers might read this:

Last week, we went out to a movie, and Boaz, who is familiar with contemporary youth culture, told us that there’s a new slang term for a worthy babe.
Svira (which translates as "reasonable". Something like "tolerable" or "adequate" or even "worthwhile", except without the positive connotations implicit in the English understatement of the word).

Wow, I said, I can’t believe it. They managed to come up with something even more insulting than "Qoosit"(*).

Qoosit – the ubiquitous Israeli term for a hot chick since, oh, since my high-school days, I guess – is a construct combining the Arabic word for "cunt" with the feminine form – I like to translate it as "cuntette". Initially shocking, and still considered rude by some prudes (Oren Genkin wrote that he reserves it for TV bimbos and Lara Croft, and would never use it for a woman he respected) – it’s currently in very broad use, by both men and women. There’s even a masculine form of it – Qooson – although that one is thankfully less widespread in use (it’s used mostly by very unselfconscious girls).

Anyway, Qoosit, once you get past the shock, is funny. It actually sounds more natural to me than the alternatives – the somewhat dated "Haticha", the American "Babe" (which infected Israel slang for a season or so) or even more awkward options (Oren O. uses "Qoozina", which in classic Israeli hybrid slang form means "female cousin", but that reeks to me of antiquated Kibbutz culture).

But "Svira" is just fucking sad. It stinks of cynical, disaffected, jaded, artificial, sterile locker-room talk. Sterile men’s talk, how’s that for an aberration?

Last Saturday I had lunch at my parents with my brother, my sister and their family. My brother’s friend, Gillian, a photographer from New York was there. She was in Israel to photograph Sharon for the New York Times (this was the second time she’d come over for that assignment: the last time, after a big hassle with the security checks, she was barred from meeting Sharon because her usual mini-skirt was deemed "inappropriate").

Anyway, as I sat down my mother said that Gillian had just been telling them about going to Boston (where I’m going for a Science Fiction convention), where she had been to take pictures for an article in Newsweek about transgendered people. My mother asked if I’d heard of the word "Hir".

Sure, I said, that’s a gender-neutral pronoun.

Gillian looked at me wide-eyed and asked how on earth I knew that.

Well, I replied glibbly, several science ficition stories have tried to have a protagonist of neutral gender…

Sometimes I love being the geek.

If I’m mentioning Gillian in the blog, and since the New York Times photo will vanish in a week, and isn’t that interesting anyway, I’ll link to her Photo essay on the victims of terrorism (the pictures were also featured in a New York Times article titled The Maimed, which I found copied around the Internet). Everyday portraits touched by abnormal violence.