maybe not today, maybe not tommorow

Seemed to solve it with shipping stuff here from the UK, which has better prices, more variety of sizes and oh, online shopping, which hasn't really caught on in Israel. Managed to sync up with a friend to buy enough stuff to qualify for free international shipping, were terribly pleased with ourselves...only to find New Look do not ship to Israel. Come on, you ship to Bahrain! There are like four people in Bahrain! Grrr, headdesk. I hate shopping. And I hate shopping that involves going into shops even more. Why, why must you make me go to the mall, global economy?

The schedule said "culture evening." I have been to, like, millions of seminars, and god knows how many culture evenings. Culture evening means silly games where you line up according to height and try to summarize your activism in interpretive dance, along with off-brand fanta, dry sponge cake and maybe someone with a guitar while we try to recall the words to Israeli pop songs from the 90s. (Israeli culture 101.)

It does not mean a live jazz band, nice nuts, fruit platters, good wine and moody lighting. WHAT IS HAPPENING? Seriously, the room looks like a wedding where all of the guests are slowly arriving at the realization they're at the wrong wedding. I am currently surrounded by 80 left wing activists staring at one another and confusion and mouthing "why are they spending this much money on us? What do they want? Couldn't they have given us the money for stuff? Are they going to eat us later?"

So weird.

ETA - I'm sorry, it's not Jazz, it's what we believe to be the world's first and only Judeo-Yemeni funk band. ("Bint al-Funk.") 

ETA2 - This is the most erotic Tu Bishvat seder i've ever heard.

Managed to get back into Jerusalem after snowpocalypse in reasonably sound order (buses running, road open) but then had to hike home because no public transport seemed to be going to Southern neighbourhoods. (Met my boss and my sister just walking along, too. (not together)). Just got here when they called from the community center and said they needed volunteers to go door to door a bit, so hiked over there and went through a few buildings that we knew had been without power for ages.

Everyone fine, it seems (though one place was still without power) but I think people were just happy to see that someone is out and about and doing stuff after probably feeling really cut off and abandoned for ages. Which did make me think, well, that's fucking nice of us, now it's basically all over. Are we just putting a nice face on, and perpetuating a sense of obligation to, a state that failed to function particularly well for this lower-middle class neighbourhood when actually in need? And then I decided to go home and take a hot shower and stop angsting pretentiously, because there's only so much political utility to that, at the end of the day.


My way overdue for December meme: Sarah Connor, the flashforwards.

I meant to be further along in my re-watch at this point and have move to say about them, because i've still got almost all of season 2 to go, but i'll give it a go anyway.

I love the way TSCC does the future. It's relentless and grim and desperate, but it also has moments of this almost baroque quality, this evocative place that has taken the shredded remains of the present and has built them up into something cherished and strange. I love the awe that everyone from beyond Judgement Day has for the present, for its boring, ordinary everyday luxuries that are treasured memories of better times for them. I also love to bits the fact that it changes all the time (and the way that's woven into the story,) and how people, or versions of people, at least, are forever emerging and disappearing and they all look for each other and can't decide if they're real or not or what, and that it's always shifting but there's still always Judgement day, which makes it way more menancing than the actul fact of the event.

Is today actually the slowest newsday of the 21st century? The evening news, in their entirety, consisted of asking people about how they feel about snow (novel twist: random Tel Aviv passersby asked how they feel about not having snow) and a story about a thing falling from a crane onto a car, in which no one was injured. At one point, the headline read "It is now cloudy."

I'm just going to go ahead and try to find it charming.

Arik Einstein died. He was a sort of perennial Israeli singer. Completely ubiquitous. No one in the country doesn't know a few of his songs by heart even if they're not particular fans. So, huh.

Also, that means a solid week with musicians being the biggest story in the country. Granted, all this week was an underage sex scandal.