gaza city/tel aviv

our field worker from gaza calls the office daily, many times a day. "shalom, gisha" i answered yesterday and she replied, "shalom gisha" as if gisha were my name. and then we had a little laugh. some days she says shalom tania, and i reply, ahlan ayda. how are you? i ask, and she replies forlornly, still alive. it catches me off guard every time, still, almost every day. oh, i say, stupidly. or, when are you coming to see us again? even more stupidly.

life in tel aviv trudges on, alongside calamity, alongside the bright sea we share in this region begrudgingly. politics seem to have gone out of fashion. a story in the paper today warned ominously about gaza's sewage spilling into the sea if fuel is not available to pump it properly. once in the sea, it wouldn't be constrained by checkpoints or security barriers. it made me think of how i am still making up for lost summers, going to the beach on saturdays and laying for hours at a time, doing not much of anything.

i moved into a new place, with two sweet girls and a dog i've grown fond of named eva. she looks at me with big sad lonely eyes when i come home and it's hard to be mad at her for chewing up the newspaper or spilling her food in the kitchen. my room has a small balcony, which faces northeast, with a view of rooftops and their solar panels and a few ugly high rise buildings and a small, old cemetery. the room itself is yellow yellow, with linoleum floors made to look like granite (so classic here) and it smells a bit like wood because of the cheap balsa wood bed frame i bought for my new, a-bit-too-hard-mattress.

this is where i live and i don't wake up anymore wondering where i am though in my waking hours i sometimes wonder what keeps me here. well, that's not true, i know it's my job that keeps me here though that doesn't prevent me from having exasperated moments, as we all do every where.

i went to this really lame wedding last night and was missing america. i just felt so alienated and different. i was thinking about how for the longest time i wanted to get married, barefoot with flowers in my hair, at the boonville hotel in northern california and suddenly there i was, at this fancy banquet hall with pyrotechnics and blaring techno music and all these israelis line-dancing. and then my great aunt turned to me and said, hopefully next time it will be you. and then the rabbi talked about how it's important that jerusalem never be divided (making not so subtle reference to the negotiations) and i started fantasizing about scandalizing this whole country by marrying ali, barefoot with flowers in my hair, on the greenline somewhere, with israelis and palestinians dancing the hora and dabke together.... and then despite it all, i had to smile to myself.