My Musings

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Sunday, July 25, 2004

Israel, Part Two: If You Haven't Already Done So, You May Want To Read Part One. Or You May Not, Because It's Really Boring

With ten seats per row in the middle and eight seats per row in the back, plus a special second floor for first class, the El Al plane was the biggest I have ever been on. I got an aisle seat in the right section around row 50, a rather nice seat, but the guy who had the window seat in that section immediately asked me if I wanted to switch and I agreed because I’m a spineless idiot. So I ended up sitting next to a window, trapped, unable visit my friends, pee, or do anything else.

The one thing I could theoretically do was write, but to write I needed a journal, and to get a journal I needed Marina, and to get Marina I needed an aisle seat, which I foolishly lost. Marina was near row 15, and when the seat belt sign went off and I saw that my two seatmates had no intention of getting up, I despaired of ever obtaining the precious journal — with the aisles likely to be crowded by listless passengers and drink-serving stewardesses, and with 35 rows between my seat and hers, getting Marina was impossible. That I’d have to pester the two strangers in my section to get up so that I could get out, and then again later so that I could get back in, only made me want to try even less. But those who know me will tell you that I am not a man who just gives up and quits in the face of adversity and danger. I give up in the face of unpleasantness and mild discomfort, too.

So I gave up, rationalizing my cowardice and laziness with the thought that Marina probably wanted the journal for herself anyway. When the plane reached cruising altitude and the diseased shitpot called New York was safely behind me, I began to write on some pages torn out of one of those free airline magazines. Luckily, the magazine had a few alcohol ads with nice, large, blank backgrounds, which were okay enough to write on, although I still had to maneuver around the bottles. Better than nothing, I supposed, but still fairly depressing, especially when I could have had a journal. If only I hadn’t given up the aisle seat…

Suddenly, to my elated astonishment, I saw Marina fighting her way down the aisle. It was the wrong aisle, of course, and from way the heck over on the wrong side of the plane, I looked longingly at Marina. Finally she saw where I was sitting and we made eye contact; although I, being a guy, can never fully master the female art of communicating via eye contact, I’ve known Marina for a long time and I can figure her eyes out a little sometimes and I believe at that moment her eyes said, “Fuck.” Then she began elbowing her way back up the aisle, and soon disappeared up ahead. A while later she returned down the aisle, the correct aisle this time, and slowly made her way over to my seat.

Marina would later remark, frequently, upon the insufferable ordeals she courageously faced whilst traversing those thirty-five rows. Squeezing past fat stomachs, jumping over drink carts, ducking between legs (at 5’1”, Marina is really short, and short people are good at such things), kicking aside obnoxious bathroom-goers — these are, I imagine, the trials Marina braved so as to render the journal to my grateful arms. Giving up her journal gave me the ability to write and kill a lot of time, and prevented her from doing the same; furthermore, performing this selfless act of kindness cost Marina a great deal of effort and frustration.

I was grateful beyond words. Marina’s noble sacrifice showed me that even though she is incredibly mean, and vicious, and calls me “worthless” and insults me on a quarter-hourly basis, and seemed cheerfully near, on the plane to New York, to vomiting all over the entire expanse of my lap, and told Natalie Lesser, in sixth grade, in horrifying violation of many earnest assurances that she would tell nobody, that I had a crush on said Natalie, in my presence no less — in spite of all these things, I saw then that Marina did in fact possess love and warmth — albeit perhaps in a microscopic quantity buried hidden and rotting in a dank and moldy corner somewhere deep within the scabrous, ashen passages of her charcoal heart — but love and warmth nonetheless.

Yes, I was grateful beyond words, which is why I probably should have taken the journal and kept my mouth shut. Instead I spoke, and with eloquence and brevity tried to express to Marina my undying gratitude for her magnificent deed. This expression of thanks would have been quite magnificent itself, were it not for my sore lacking in both eloquence and brevity, resulting in an incoherent babble that fell deaf to Marina’s annoyed ears because she was at that moment being stampeded by a torrent of mobile irate passengers, about as welcome in the aisle as a ten-pound kidney stone in the urinary tract. Finally I stopped speaking, or maybe Marina just told me to shut up, and then she left, disappearing forever into the sweaty mists of the forward seating section.

Procrastination is one of the most potent forces in the universe, right up there with hydrogen bombs and quasars. I have always been a huge procrastinator when it comes to writing, but I thought that since I was chained up in a window seat for ten hours with nothing to do except write, I would write, especially since I don’t really know what a “quasar” is. Yeah. Amazing, really, how many things, other than writing of course, I found instead to occupy my time: eating, reading, sleeping, trying to sleep, pretending to sleep, pretending to try to sleep, just plain sitting, pretending to just plain sit but actually trying to sleep, and on and on, all the while Marina’s battle-scarred journal sat idle in my seatback pocket smushed next to the headphones and the magazine with the torn-out alcohol ads.

Speaking of eating, I have to say that the El Al dinner was marvelous. A few hours into the flight I developed a frightening hunger and, along with it, the gnawing fear that I would have to consume my entire supply of Nutri-Grain bars. But the dinner was so delicious and so filling that I couldn’t even finish the breakfast the stewardess served several hours later, let alone the Nutri-Grain bars (which by then were no longer bar-like in their composition, due to the forcible compaction process that had long ago turned them into raspberry-scented granola paste inside my backpack). Quite a feat given that airline food is generally about as appetizing as sawdust. For breakfast we had a choice between an omelet and some other thing. Airline omelet sounded like a bad move so I chose the other thing, which I don’t remember what it was except that it was gross and I didn’t eat it.

I was the only person, as far as I later gathered, who thought the flight was too short. When the plane began its descent into Israel, other people sighed with exaltation at the visible end of the miserable, cramped, ten-hour journey, and the visible beginning of an exciting, wonderful, life-changing experience. But not me. I was still scribbling furiously about Irene’s bad experience with the security interview. Not even at the icebreaker yet! I fumed. I might have finished chronicling the events of the day had I not been such a procrastinating lazy bastard, and had I not wasted so much time writing an introductory treatise on automatic bathrooms, which segued nicely into the actual story but was otherwise long and entirely irrelevant and un-noteworthy save for my successful usage of the phrase “handjob soap machine” in a valid sentence.

On Saturday, May 16, I woke up in my bed at home for the last time. Twenty-one hours and a little over eight pages later, I finally took my first step on Israeli soil in the Jerusalem airport. It was beautiful. It was stupendous. It was stupid and boring just like every other airport. The ATM didn’t like my card and wouldn’t give me any money, even though I really wanted money. My bank account seriously had money in it, too — the blasted ATM must have been in cahoots with the evil interrogator lady who didn’t like me. “He’s a bad Jew — let him STARVE!!” I bet that’s the message the interrogator lady sent to the ATM. Luckily I had brought spare cash with me, sixty dollars of which I traded in for a little over two-hundred fifty of the Israeli Shekels. So take THAT, bitch.

The gals and I decided — which is to say, the gals decided — that we should get money first and luggage later. By the time we got the money issue settled, everybody else had already taken their luggage off the conveyor, so there weren’t many suitcases left on the merry-go-round and ours were easy to find. Except for Irene’s. Her suitcase wasn’t there. Perhaps — a chill ran down my spine at the thought — Irene (or should I say “Irene”) was actually indeed a terrorist, and security discovered, in her suitcase, among other things, a nuclear warhead. Then they confiscated the luggage and were about to go arrest Irene, but the warhead blew up and everybody died, along with Irene’s underwear. Upon not seeing her luggage, Irene began to panic, ostensibly because her luggage was gone, but truthfully because her jig was up.

It turned out that Irene was blinder than a blind bat and didn’t realize that the conveyor had stopped moving and that her suitcase was sitting very peacefully by its lonesome self on the other side of the baggage claim.

Suitcases in hand and Shekels in wallet, everybody assembled for some introductory words of welcome and preliminary announcements, which must not have been very important because I don’t remember any of them. The junior coordinators performed a random passport check, the point of which I’m not entirely clear on except that Irene wasn’t chosen for it, a major stroke of luck that ensured her true, thieving terrorist identity would remain unknown. At this time we also met our tour guide, a handsome man in his early fifties named Shabbat. “Shabbat” is also the word for Saturday, the Jewish day of rest, except with the other syllable stressed — so, the guide’s name was SHA-butt whereas the weekly holiday is pronounced sha-ASS, er, excuse me, sha-BUTT. Syllable vagaries aside, Shabbat’s name was very fitting and Jewish, as was the name of the Quest bus’s tour guide: “Israeli.” Surely the Jewishness of our tour guides’ names was a good omen.

.: posted by Boris 5:36 PM

Thursday, July 01, 2004

Israel, Part One: Getting On the Plane

Several months ago, two of my friends, Marina and Irene — well, mostly it was just Marina — convinced me — well, threatened serious bodily injury if I declined — to go to Israel. There’s an organization called Birthright Israel which sponsors free (FREE!) tours of Israel for Jews aged 18-26 who have never been on a similar tour before. These trips are a great opportunity for young Jewish people to see their homeland, learn about their cultural roots, and hook up with each other, which is awesome, but Marina’s keen dog nose whiffed rumors that funds for the Birthright trips were drying up, so the three of us decided to go while the opportunity still existed.

Since this is a public blog, I realize it would be out of line for me to try to push my personal religious beliefs here. However, if you are not Jewish, I have a question for you: does YOUR religion get you a FREE TRIP to the homeland of your people?? Does it?? Think about THAT next time you go to church, or to Buddha, or to the human virgin sacrificial altar, or to wherever it is that you practice your religion.

The only catch to this ABSOLUTELY FREE TOUR OF ISRAEL was that the plane to Israel left from New York, which is far away from Columbus, at least on a sub-cosmic level, so Marina, Irene and I had to catch a plane to New York first. After many tearful goodbyes at the Columbus International Airport, which is not international, the three of us finally managed to tear loose from our parents’ worried death-grips and went to our gate to wait for the plane.

Was I afraid to go to Israel? Thanks to our beloved news media, many Americans think of Israel as a dangerous place where you can’t take three steps without having a bomb blow up in your face. But in fact, the odds of being killed in a terrorist attack in Israel are no greater than the odds of being killed in a fatal car accident here in America. I used to be afraid of driving, but now I’m not, so I figured going to Israel would be okay, although my mom did not share my lighthearted attitude and my grandma, I feel, came very close to playing the Guilt card she used on me in seventh grade when I said I wanted gerbils. “Either me, or the rat,” was her ultimatum. I ended up getting a cat.

We were excited about going to Israel and chatted gaily. Marina and I hadn’t seen Irene in a long time — she lives in Cincinnati — so we mostly talked about her. Her high school graduation was the day after we came home from Israel, and next fall she is going to MIT, which means if any of you want to see her you might want to get down to Cincinnati right quick because by October she might not be alive anymore. Having finished our first year of college, Marina and I fancied ourselves great experts on the meaning of life, and we offered Irene a lot of advice that she probably discarded as trash and forgot immediately.

At some point during our conversation, the plane — the one that was supposed to take us to New York — left.

The airport lady seemed cross and insisted that she had announced a final boarding call three times and even paged our names. I figured we must have collectively tuned out the last half hour’s worth of PA announcements, but Marina and Irene thought the lady was a vicious liar plotting a conspiracy of some sort or other against us. Whatever the case, a nice man was there and he gave us tickets for a flight leaving a measly two hours later. Initially we had bought extremely early tickets on purpose just in case if something bad happened. “Something bad” was not supposed to include “the three of us have the cumulative intelligence of a clogged gutter,” but nonetheless we still had plenty of time — the new flight was scheduled to arrive in New York around 1:30, and the plane to Israel did not leave for another six hours after that — so I was not very worried about our little booboo. The way I saw the situation, the worst thing that could happen was we’d miss the Israel trip. On the one hand, I’d miss out on visiting a beautiful country and discovering the history of my people. But on the other hand, I’d get to play a lot more computer games. Everything balanced out.

My female pals, however, were not so relaxed. I could hardly finish one sentence of my book (awesome book, by the way — Fahrenheit 451) before either Marina or Irene, or both, would start spazzing: “Could we REALLY have missed our NAMES being paged over the LOUDSPEAKER? That lady HAD to have been lying. I mean, could we REALLY…” The monstrous tragedy was relived every five seconds. For two hours I sat and alternated between 1) trying to get my hormonally imbalanced companions to relax, 2) trying to get them to shut up, and 3) trying to resist going to the bathroom and drowning myself in a toilet bowl.

I was failing pretty badly at all three, but luckily the plane arrived just as I was about to go kill myself, and this time we didn’t miss it. Arriving in New York’s La Guardia Airport with many hours to spare, we nabbed a taxi to JFK Airport, because the plane to Israel departed there. An irritation, yes, that we landed in the wrong airport (cheaper tickets), but a filthy, disgusting, smelly, ugly, hideous, worthless, dangerous, traffic-congested city like New York needs to have multiple airports so that people can get the hell away from there as quickly as possible.

At the El Al terminal — El Al is the Israeli airline company — we paid the taxi driver and took our stuff and were about to leave when suddenly the driver asked us for a yellow slip. “What yellow slip?” Marina asked him. “You were supposed to take a yellow slip when you got the taxi,” he replied. “I need it now so that I can get back into the airport.” Our faces went white. Ohhh shit. Nobody had taken the yellow slip. We were alone in a strange, scary city talking to a big black man who wanted a yellow slip from us which we did not possess. How important was this slip to him? Might it mean his career? His life? Maybe he thought we were hiding the yellow slip. The guy was easily big enough to bludgeon us all to death with his fists and search our lifeless bodies to make sure we weren’t. He could grab out stuff, throw it in the taxi, and force us to ride back to La Guardia with him to get the yellow slip. Heck, at that moment, as far as I was concerned, it was not far outside the realm of possibility for the taxi driver to get VERY VERY ANGRY and turn into a giant green Hulk (atrocious movie, by the way) and squish us all with his big toe, and then examine the resulting paste for yellow slip remains.

The cabbie smiled. He said that while a yellow slip would be nice, he could survive without one, and drove away. Marina, Irene, and I let out one big breath, cursed ourselves once again for our stupidity, and proceeded into the airport.

Apparently, baggage flies on the same plane that the people do. I learned this fact during the journey to New York; previously I had thought that there was a separate baggage plane. Is that not a natural thing to think? Marina and Irene didn’t seem to think so, and now whenever they want to make fun of me for being stupid, they whisper “baggage plane” and whip themselves up into a laughing frenzy.

The Birthright group was not particularly difficult to spot, as it was the only small mass of Jewish-looking teenagers gathered amidst a blob of luggage and backpacks. Marina, Irene and I approached the gathering and made our own little clump of baggage that was very close to, but not a part of, the main group. As you can see, we are not very social. We stood there awkwardly until somebody asked us if we were on Birthright, at which point we went towards the edge of the blob, as far away from the other people as possible, and sat, also awkwardly.

As more people arrived, we were forced to make painful small talk with the ones that decided to sit down at our edge. One guy we met, Jeff, had just finished his Bachelor’s degree in English and opera performance, and was now about to go to law school. Jeff and his brother Mike ended up being my roommates for the trip. A girl with really big boobs also sat down near us. Even as I was thinking about how big her boobs were, she was telling one of her friends about a wedding she went to where some important father, maybe it was the bride’s father, I don’t remember, would not stop blatantly staring at her boobs. Maybe it was all the people’s fathers. However many old men stared at her boobs, though, I completely sympathized with them all.

At this time we also met Sarah, one of the junior coordinators on the Quest bus. The 84 people going on the trip were divided into two groups, Quest and Foot, and it turned out that the itineraries for the two groups were about 80% identical, with Foot doing more hiking and one ridiculously difficult biking trip (originally there was a third group, Bike, that didn’t generate enough interest and therefore got merged with Foot). We chose — okay, Marina chose — to sign up for Foot, lest Quest turn out to be too touristy, so Sarah was not on our bus.

However, talking to Sarah was nonetheless very beneficial, because we learned a great deal about the responsibilities of a junior coordinator, which were: nothing. Sarah didn’t know what we were doing, or when we were doing it, or where we were staying. In fact, she did not seem to know anything at all. When I asked Sarah, in slightly more diplomatic terms, what the crap the point of a junior coordinator was if they didn’t know diddly squat, she told me that her job was to “make sure everybody has a good time.” Which sounded pretty ridiculous to me, because if someone’s having a bad time, what are you going to do? Yank them aside and perform juggling tricks with colored balls? Sneak up behind them and inject heroin into their bloodstream?

The last person of note who we met at this point was a girl named Yana. Yana just finished her freshman year at Johns Hopkins. She is a very smart chemical engineering major who hopes to go to law school some day and become a patent lawyer, but more to the point, she knows a guy at Hopkins named Ron who went to high school with me and Marina. Sly matchmaker that he is, Ron preemptively told Yana about Marina and Marina about Yana, so the two girls immediately formed a bond when they met. Consequently Yana roomed with Marina and Irene and spent a great deal of time with our antisocial cluster throughout the trip.

Checking luggage and obtaining a ticket required passage through the most grueling airport security interrogation of my life. Standing in line, I saw a row of about ten young, handsome El Al personnel each engaged in friendly (or so it appeared) conversation with a would-be passenger. Normally I don’t get asked many questions in the airport; just the usual stupid ones along the lines of, “Is there film in your luggage? How about a rocket launcher? Are you sure nobody snuck one of those in there while you weren’t looking?” I suppose I should have considered more deeply what all the intense conversation was about, instead of assuming that the El Al questioners were pleasantly chatting with the Birthright kids about the weather. I would have loved to talk about the weather. In Cleveland, where I go to college, the weather is heinously bad, so it comprises about 97% of all conversation that takes place on campus, and I have become a highly practiced conversationist on that subject, even though generally I have the social skills of a discolored Christmas tree ornament.

As my time in line drew to a close and I approached my interrogator, I quickly saw that the young face which had seemed friendly from a distance was actually cold and impassive, the eyes flat. Immediately the girl began blasting me with questions about my Judaism. Did I know any Hebrew? Did my parents? Did my grandparents? Did my cat? No?? Why not?? One after another her questions pelted my ears. All I could say was “No…no…uh, no…” and with each No, I saw the girl becoming more and more convinced that I was a bad Jew and, consequently, a bad person. As the interview wore on, the girl seemed so menacing, so angry at my apparent disregard for the Jewish faith, that I grew increasingly worried she would slap me across both cheeks and physically throw me, by the neck, out of a window.

Her: “How did your family celebrate Hanukah?”
Me: “Well, we don’t really…I mean, we lit the, uh—“
Her: [interrupting] “What is the story behind Hanukah?”
Me: “Um…something to do with candles…?”
Her: [almost spitting with anger] “Everybody knows that!”

Things were going poorly. I knew I had scored a few points — my grandparents spoke Yiddish, I had family in Israel, up through third grade I went to a private Hebrew school — but I needed a kicker, a grand slam to convince the evil little interrogator that I was in fact Jewish. Luckily for me, towards the end of the interview she asked: “What is the story behind Pesach?” And I was home free. In English Pesach is called “Passover,” which is part of the story of how the Jews finally escaped from several centuries of slavery at the hands of the Egyptians. Frankly I don’t know why God waited four hundred years to do this, but eventually he came around and smote the Egyptians with ten great plagues: Water Turning to Blood, Boils, Plague of Locusts, A Shitload of Frogs, Menstrual Cycle Alignment, Reality TV, and some others that I can’t remember. The most important plague was the tenth one, where God stopped screwing around with fancy stuff like the frogs and blood-water and just went and killed all of the Egyptians’ first-borns. Beforehand, though, the Jews, in order that their families be spared, marked their doorposts with lamb blood. Or maybe it was goat blood. Or sheep blood. Anyway, some kind of blood, and then, when God went on his killing spree, he saw the blood and knew which houses to “pass over” and not kill the first-born inside. Thus the name of the holiday, “Passover.” We Jews are a witty bunch.

Having spent the past five minutes cowering meekly under the rage of the wrathful questioner, I was excited beyond all belief to finally get a question which I could answer. You can imagine the long, passionate rant I began to unfurl upon the gears of the interrogator’s angry little mind, but about three sentences into it she cut me off. I was pissed, even though the cut-off meant that she was done with me and I could continue onwards to drop off my luggage and get my ticket.

I was not the only one who had a difficult time with the El Al security questions. People swapped horror stories from the experience right up until the plane ride home. Nor did I have the most horrifying story — Irene, who knows even less about Judaism than I do, and who had a really mean interrogator, actually “failed” the interview. She is a small, skinny girl, four foot eleven. Clearly, a terrorist. After the initial grilling, she was pulled aside for extra questioning by an angry, frothing woman who moved her head closer to Irene’s after every question, so that eventually the two were practically making out. Finally the mean lady quit molesting Irene and let her check her luggage, but there was a catch. Instead of the yellow stickers that my and everybody else’s luggage got, Irene’s luggage got white stickers. The security people tried to do it all cool and sneaky like, not telling anybody about the color difference, thinking they could get away with the ploy without anybody noticing, but we noticed their little games all right. Unfortunately, since asking “Hey, why the fuck did Irene get white stickers?” would probably not have been a prudent move, we really had no way of finding out what the white meant. For all we knew, maybe the white stickers were a signal to enter all of Irene’s personal information into a suspected criminal database, so that even as we speak she is being surveyed by top-notch spies from all over the globe, and if she ever goes into a dark alley and purchases a plasma gun from a shady weapons dealer, all of the world’s governments will know about it and react accordingly with tanks and nuclear missiles. Sorry, Irene: no plasma guns for you!

Irene’s backpack was searched and confiscated. Nothing bad was found inside, but the plane did not leave for another couple of hours, and of course it would have been MADNESS to allow a maniac criminal psychopathic killer like Irene to have an unsupervised backpack for two hours and then bring it on a plane. Who knows what kind of vile things she could put in there during that time? Guns, grenades, vials of anthrax, all of which I’m sure could be found in the airport, since we were, after all, in New York. When the plane boarding began, Irene and two other suspected homicidal bad-Jews were escorted directly to the gate, thus making ABSOLUTELY DARN SURE that Irene would not be able to stuff her backpack with explosives in the fifteen or so minutes before the plane left. (Never mind that for the past two hours she had been absolutely free to purchase explosives and fill her pockets, her shoes, and any of my, Marina’s, or Yana’s backpacks with them.)

While we were waiting at the gate, a little Jewish boy came up and started peppering me with questions. I guess I was friendly-looking and his parents never taught him not to talk to strangers. “Are you Jewish?” he asked me. I told him I was. “Are you good to other Jewish people?” he asked. “Yes, I hope so,” I told him. Next question: “Why aren’t you wearing a yarmulke?” Shit. This kid was worse than the interrogator girl. Jewish men are supposed to always keep their heads covered, and a yarmulke — also called a kippa — is a thin flat thing that one dons for this purpose when not already wearing a hat. I and most Jews you’re likely to find are not very religious, however, so we don’t wear kippas, but at that particular moment I did not really feel like trying to explain what it meant to be Jewish and yet not religious. I have a hard enough time explaining that concept to people my own age. You will not believe how many times I’ve had the following conversation:

Me: “I don’t believe in God.”
Person: [confused] “Waaaaaait…I thought you were Jewish?”
Me: “That is correct.”
Person: [really confused] “But…you just said…you don’t believe in God…?”
Me: “Okay?”
Person: [explodes]

I did not want to corrupt this boy, who was obviously being raised in a very Jewish family, with such talk, so instead I casually replied, “I guess I’m a bad Jew.” To which he pointedly queried, “Well then how can you be good to other Jewish people if you’re a bad Jew yourself?” The kid was good. However, I wasn’t quite yet willing to give up the fight, so I calmly replied, “Ummmmm…” and then luckily his mom dragged him away a few moments later.

Shortly before boarding began, the Quest and Foot people split up into their respective groups. I don’t know what the Quest people did, but we Footers got into a circle — it was the first of many circles on the trip — and played a game of LICE, which stands for “Lamest Icebreaker Created Ever.” LICE is a go-around-the-circle kind of game. Each person has to give three facts about themselves, one of which is false. Then everybody else guesses which fact is the lie. Of course everybody tries to be really clever, thinking up something outrageous as one of their true facts and making the false fact sound nondescript, i.e., “I have two brothers,” when really the person only has one. The idea is to find out some random, way too personal fact about everybody in the circle. However, if you’re gonna try to break the ice that way, I say just make everybody get naked and play Twister.

After the game of LICE — which was really annoying because half of the people didn’t talk loudly enough to be heard over the ambient noise in the airport and the other half screwed up the rules somehow (Maya, for instance, a junior coordinator, gave four facts instead of three, and they were all true) — we sat around for a little while longer and finally started to board the plane. Right as we were about to get on, I suddenly remembered that I wanted to borrow Marina’s journal. A lot of stuff had happened already and I wanted to write about it so that I wouldn’t forget, and so that I’d have something to do during the ten hour flight after I got sick of reading and trying to sleep. Sadly, I didn’t think to pack anything to write on, which is why Marina had graciously offered me her journal earlier, and which for some reason I did not take right away. Now it was too late, since the crowd was pushing us onward and Marina would have generated a great deal of anger if she stopped to root through her backpack. Thus, I told her I’d find her once we were in the air.

As we were waiting in line to board the plane, I saw an old lady being pushed by in a wheelchair. She held a long and skinny box that, judging from the picture on it, contained a pogo stick. I’m sure there was a perfectly logical explanation for a crippled woman to possess a pogo stick, but the only images going through my head at the moment were of this decrepit woman hopping out of the wheelchair onto her pogo stick and bouncing around like a kangaroo. I started chuckling uncontrollably once I felt she was out of earshot. I am a cruel, mean person.

My Musings

Sunday, July 25, 2004

.: posted by Boris 5:36 PM

Thursday, July 01, 2004

.: posted by Boris 4:11 PM