Boogie

I shift my leg to another position, rustling my bed covers. From beneath my bed, I hear a quiet coo. No, I refuse to get up, because it’s still early – it’s like six in the morning probably. I hide my head underneath my covers, trying to fool her. In the next second, I hear a soft whoosh of air and a delicate pat of paws on my bed when she lands. She plants herself right next to the mountain of covers that is my body, and waits.

This used to be a morning ritual four years ago when I was living at home, and we seem to have picked up right where we left off. The only difference between now and then is that I didn’t used to feed her breakfast.

“I’m not awake,” I mumble, “go away.” If she did this to my mom in the morning, she’d get flung off the bed. I, of course, am a total sucker, too soft to do any kind of flinging. She knows it too, which is why she’s making herself more comfortable by reclining next to me.

I peak one eye out from beneath my covers and she starts to purr, her small body vibrating through the blanket. I always wonder if she’s just excited that we wake up at all in the mornings. That’s a sweet thought, right? Realistically though, she’s probably just excited that she’ll be fed soon. I bet she’d purr for a total stranger if they opened a can of Chicken Feast in Gravy for her. Traitor.

I stick my head back under the blanket, and she gets up. She walks right along the curve of my arm, getting closer to where my head should be. I can feel her front paws on my shoulder, and then her back paws and bottom on my chest as she sits down. She’s probably doing her tidy sit, back on her haunches, with her two front paws straight down under her shoulders. She was born a stray on an abandoned patio, but that didn’t affect her prim temperament. Prim and proper and conservative. This is her patient sit. I peak my head out again and confirm my mental image. She swats a paw gently at my head when I retreat immediately back under the covers.

There’s absolutely no question as to who’s going to outlast who here. She’s got nothing better to do, and this is probably fun for her. But she decides to speed up the process. I’d left myself an opening between the covers right above my head, so she quietly pads a few steps over to it and reaches a single paw inside. I feel her paw nip my hair, so I shift myself so I can see her and find her face inches from mine, her ears perked up. The demon’s still purring, and I give in. I stretch my arm out from beneath my cocoon of blanket and she anticipates it, reaching up with her head to meet my hand as it comes down to pet her. Purring intensity doubles, and I’m awake.

She puts on quite a show, rubbing against my hand for pets, and nudging it for more when it falls idly to the bed. My resentment at being woken quickly dissipates every time I feel her wet nose nudge my fingers, and I acknowledge her wily brilliance: being adorable and knowing how to use it. She probably wouldn’t do this for a stranger, I think, even if they had an entire live chicken for her to feast on.

-Leila

Sushi Night

The night before I flew to Los Angeles for a three week visit, my boyfriend’s buddy Netanel decided he wanted to arrange a sushi night. A few hours prior to the event my man called to tell me that it would be at our apartment, which is the only apartment with a large enough kitchen for more than two people to prepare sushi.

As the evening rolled around and I got out of my end-of-a-summer-day shower, I saw the BF on his way out the door. He left saying, “ I’ll be right back.” I just got a shirt over my head when I heard a ring at the door. Two beautiful smiling brunettes entered the apartment with bags of cooking materials. I started to feel uneasy. I’m not use to competition from other women in this space. Behind them was the master mind behind the night.

After hello kisses and exchanges of smiles the women started with requests. Do you have a large mixing bowl? Do you have any cucumbers? I was happy to be busy up and down my toes in the cabinets and plie’ing into the refrigerator, the activity prevented the awkwardness of sitting in front of these women in my apartment preparing dinner. Do you know where Imri is, I asked? They were wondering the same thing. It had been forty minutes since he left.

The four of us were crammed at the kitchen table in front of the only fan and sliced cucumbers, carrots and bell peppers into thin strips whenImri and another one of the guys, Matan, entered. They were carrying fresh salmon and smoked salmon….five different kinds of soft cheeses and a freshly baked loaf of onion bread. “Sushi never fills me up,” explained Imri. I had a feeling he was too Israeli for Japanese food. Later when Matan added an Israeli/Arabic spicy sauce called Schug, Natanel felt that we had gone too far off course. “Why don’t you just add Hummus while you’re at it!” he said accusingly.

The two boys began filling up on bread and cheese while Natanel began instructing us girls on how to roll sushi rolls. Each had our turn as the others commented on how tasty it looked or on how neatly you were spreading the rice . After each roll was prepared and cut, we munched as we watched the next person roll. When Matan was up he stuffed his with both types of Salmon, all the vegetables, and one of the soft cheeses. His roll was huge! It’s cuts stood as a testament to his masculinity amongst our dainty ones. I rolled my eyes.

After dinner, the girls  insisted on doing the dishes. Later Imri bragged to his other friends that the two women cleaned his kitchen for him (Which is a lie, there were three women.  Yes I am offended). After an initial three seconds of guilt, the boys sat  in front of a soccer game. They grew up with egalitarian ideology, but it didn’t look like it was too difficult for them to enjoy the role split after the women rejected their help. Once the kitchen was spotless and white, we all sat in the living room, with the one fan moving from left to right accross our sticky bodies.  I fell into a conversation with one of the girls (the other one was busy cuddling with her new boyfriend, Netanel). It occurred to me how happy I was to be speaking with a fellow female. She was interested in all my stories and in all the pictures I showed her on my computer. I didn’t want her to go. It amused me that I ever feel threatened by women.

“It was nice to be with a woman,” I said to Imri as the door closed behind the exiting group. “Not that I don’t love being with you and the guys.”

“We are different,” he replied.

“Not as much as you act like we are,” I answered automatically with my usual rebellion against the gender split.

-Dror

Nix Your Hiatus, please

Some form of an update coming soon. I’ve just been thrown into the thick of 2L stuff after a summer abroad, and I’m having issues organizing my life at the moment.

Meanwhile, Dror’s letting her mind wander lazily without committing any of it to sentences. I can dig that, but the blog is lonely. Update me please, Dror – Blog.

-Leila

Rodents on Campus

We’re not really supposed to feed the squirrels, but a handful of crumbs on the ground is all it takes.

“I saw somewhere that squirrels can carry diseases,” Rebecca said. She and I were sitting outside on the gazebo, catching the warm summer air in between training sessions.

“It’s weird how they get so close,” I said, eyeballing a squirrel as it dug a small hole at the base of a tree and packed a walnut inside.

“It’s ‘cause everyone feeds them,” Rebecca said. She was thumbing through a book about spies and espionage, sharing odd tidbits with me, breaking my concentration. Only Rebecca would check out a how-to book about spies and espionage for pleasure reading, I thought. A week later she would check out a book about 50 jewish women who changed the world, and another about an LSD summer. Somewhere in the mix too was Middle Sex, a book about mobsters, and a cheap romance novel about two people in an arranged marriage who learn to love each other (passionately, of course).

“It’s getting closer,” I said, watching a squirrel inch nearer to our table. A group of middle school children had toured the campus earlier that hour and piled their disposable lunchboxes so high above the trash can that the mound threatened to collapse at any moment. The trash can was right by our table, and we’d noticed that a single Grandma’s cookie had fallen from the mound onto the floor, still wrapped.

“Maybe it’s going for the cookie?”

I had stopped tapping my foot on the floor, but the squirrel was coming for it anyway; before Rebecca or I could react, the squirrel was close enough to pet. We stomped our legs and shooed it with our arms, but it would not budge. It stared curiously at us instead, taking a few steps forward and a few back underneath the table. I became mildly apprehensive, not understanding what the squirrel wanted, or whether it would jump. Rebecca and I exchanged raised eyebrows, and I tucked my legs beneath me on top of the chair. “Go get the cookie!” We both said, as though the squirrel would understand us – we even pointed. But the squirrel remained where it was, tail twitching.

Finally, Rebecca took one of her flip flops off and chucked it at the rodent. The shoe made a dull thud as it landed on the floor a few feet away, and the squirrel finally bolted: unharmed, but maybe a little more weary of mankind. I released my legs back onto the floor, and Rebecca reclined back into her chair, picking up her spies and espionage book. “So, this is weird…” She said. And the afternoon faded.

-Leila

Clips from the dream life I am living.

After three drafts, bouts of self criticism, and a lagging and heavy writers block I decided to “do it already.” And the best way to “just write”: tell the truth, accept it and yourself, and pass GO. So here I go. I will use clips that epitomize the dream life I am living between my weeks in the international and historical Jerusalem and my weekends in the nature of northern Israel at the foot of the Carmel Mountain.

WEEK:

“Look, it’s someone like you dancing in her room.”

I told him I do that? I wondered looking up to the third floor of a stone build at a shadow moving against curtains. The shadow bent backwards with her arms open raising her chest to the heavens before breaking out and jumping up and down.

“It’s a little girl,” I said, my voice tender in excitement over the child.

“No it’s not, it’s a young woman like you,” Amit insisted.

“No, it’s a girl,” I said in the same voice my boyfriend accused me of switching into when we discovered a kitten in a garden, “Look at her arms…and her legs.”

The curtains suddenly parted in a burst and the shadow shrunk into a brown-eyed girl no older than six or seven with long dark hair. She looked down onto the street.

“It is a girl. A really little girl,” Amit admitted.

“Of course it is. I was once one of those, I should know,” I responded. I was once exactly one of those- a little girl dancing in her room.

“She knew we were looking at her,” I said, wondering if it is possible that she heard us from up there.

“She felt it.”

After an enchanted stare, I brought my head away and looked straight down the lit street lined with Mediterranean trees. On nights like this I breathe in the aesthetic elements unique to my Jerusalem and let myself get excited that I am living this world and calling it my home. My romance with Jerusalem is still very young and I melt in moments like this when the love is awakened in me anew.

A half hour later, on a similar looking street I sat on a bench dripping tahini onto the sidewalk from a schnitzel and baguette sandwich reminding myself of some Middle Eastern version of a Carl’s Junior commercial. As I enjoyed my dinner cross legged and bending over the concrete, Amit amused me with a story of a Southern French orthodox man, complete with a black suit and long beard, who spoke to him of his drunk days as a sixteen year old in a “Zorba the Greek” type village as they smoked joints together.

We were suppose to be at a jazz concert, but neither of us knew where it was actually taking place. It sure wasn’t happening at the academy of music we found nearly empty. This was plan B, and it sure was nice.

WEEKEND:

I woke up to a dark room.

“What?” I mumbled.

“We didn’t wake up,” Imri answered.

What is he talking about? I asked myself confused. It’s the middle of the night.

“Do you want to keep sleeping or should we catch up to them?”

The sunrise hike! Let’s go, I commanded myself in my head. Let’s just sleep, it’s comfortable under the cool sheets and the air of the fan, I answered myself. “We’ll catch up,” came out of my mouth.

He immediately jumped out of bed and I lie there not convinced that I really want to get up. After a quick tap on my legs I started oozing slowly to the side to the bed, finally leaking off at the edge. UP! I yelled in my head.

In five minutes we were dressed and carrying our pre-packed backpacks.

We climbed a steep line straight up sweating. We complained about how stiff our muscles are in the morning and praised the cool of this hour before the oppressive sun of the day. After not much more than ten minutes (maybe it was more) we found our gang sitting with Turkish coffee cooking over a burner and wafers. The sun was still rising. Yes, we didn’t miss it! It was about five-thirty in the morning.

At seven we ran and slide down the sandy, rocky slopes of another side of the mountain, avoiding the low trees and trying not to stop for fear of falling from the momentum. At the foot of the mountain we crossed the gate of the community pool, just filled yesterday! Summer has officially begun. We stripped down into our swim suits and jumped in.

There were only old folks there taking morning swims or walking in the shallow water (apparently it’s “exercise for the lazy.”). Out of the water, we sat back in plastic chairs in our swimsuits and sunglasses posing as the cool twenty-somethings. We were asked more than once, “Shouldn’t you all still be in bed at your age on a Saturday morning?” “We just came back from a morning hike,” we bragged.

“This is the life,” someone said; or maybe I said it. Either way it was felt.

-Dror

Pickles with ice cream on a Thursday night

I could tell the bag boy wanted to say something. He was looking at us out of the corner of his eye as he bagged, a sliver of a smile on his face.

“Will that be all for you today?” The cashier asked. I could see her bite her lip as she bagged Adison’s Kosher Dills and Pop Secret.

We would have gone elsewhere, but the Bel Air was the only nearby food source open at 10:00 at night. It was probably the most appropriate anyway.

I was craving chocolate and ice cream – I’d been craving it all week. Kori was craving frosting (if not specifically that night, then at least as a generality). She’s always craving frosting. Adison was craving dill pickles and popcorn. So we wandered the supermarket aisles looking for a fix, chattering as we went. I passed a few bags of beef jerky that my palate seriously considered before settling back on the sweets. Adison looked adoringly at Bel Air’s apple stock before turning to us with shame and telling us that, for once, she was going to pass by the Red Delicious and choose sodium instead. I don’t think any one of us noticed how suspicious our snack combinations were.

The cashier rang up my Drumsticks and Milky Way first, and Kori’s frosted cinnamon rolls and mint-chip ice-cream sandwiches next. Taken separately, the snacks probably wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow, but it was clear we were all together for the evening and planning on sharing. We’d covered a lot of tasty bases: sweet, cold, creamy, chocolatey. Salty, pickled, crunchy, buttery. When Adison’s turn came, the bag boy couldn’t keep it in any longer.

“You guys high?” He asked. The cashier gave him a stare, but she couldn’t help herself either, “Or pregnant?”

We all confirmed we were neither – we were just having another nice evening.

- Leila

Mini Update/Finals Crack

I have been stuck in the vacuum of finals for the last two weeks, and will continue to be stuck there until May 15, at which time I will gloriously chuck my computer out the window and run screaming through town.

Okay maybe not…because I <3 my computer…screaming through town may be a possibility…

So this is obviously not a “story”, but I haven’t posted in so long, I am going through withdrawals. Believe me, I would much rather be writing about my wacky friends than going over contract slides and reading about the Recording Act. The night before my Civil Procedure final, I dreamt of a woman who kept asking me if her case had personal jurisdiction, but it just wasn’t proper. So she kept trying to get me to change my outline so that it could be proper, but it just wasn’t. Exactly.

So I leave you with this picture, because it is the sole taste of photography I’ve had time for in the past few weeks, and I am proud of it.

Working horse takin' a break in San Francisco

- Leila

Her Dog is a Soul

I walked up the staircase in the beautiful twilight of a spring evening toward the Carmel Mountain standing before me. “Dona! Dona, come back here!” I heard my grandmother shouting. Oh boy, I thought as I saw her standing on her porch, she’s cranky today.

“This dog is driving me crazy,” she answered my oh-boying eyes.
We walked into the house where the air smelled of a Shabbat meal still in pots. My grandma started lifting pot covers and utensils noisily, not quite decisive on any one action. “You have no idea what a difficult day I had. My foot became swollen and I couldn’t walk. Earlier I found a picture in my mailbox of Edo and asked Joshua if he put it there. He said no and that I could wait outside for Edo if I wanted to ask him. He told me to wait outside! What am I, his whore, that he should have me waiting?”

My grandmother and her husband Joshua separated a few months ago after thirty five years of marriage. Edo is their son, biologically his and raised by her. I’m not sure who it was that initiated the idea of a separation, but it is clear that after over three decades, my lively fire filled grandmother and her silent water filled partner decided that they just do not get along…at all. At least not when they are living in the same house. One needed a conversation partner who would get excited over her projects, one needed the appropriate silence to enjoy his introverted world. And then they just started to say mean things to each other out of the frustration.

As I helped my grandmother put food on the table, Dona, the tiny, fat, red-haired dog who’s breed I can’t make out and who has a thick eye-liner looking outline around both eyes, jumped up hoping someone would find her cute enough to give her food.

“I accidentally locked her out on the back balcony today,” grandma told me, “And when I let her in she jumped up and hit me with her paws. I swear to you, my dog is a (human) soul. She talks. She gestures with her head to say ‘come on, open the door and let me out.’ She shows me when she doesn’t have water and exposes her teeth when I make her angry. My dog is a soul.”

“She really is a smart dog,” I admitted.

“She’s REALLY smart. But she’s been sad lately. She was use to Joshua giving her a lot of love and spoiling her. He use to give her her favorite things to eat and she would sit on his lap while he pet her. He betrayed her. He doesn’t pay attention to her any more. Today, when I was down there, she went into his apartment and came back not long after looking depressed. I think he kicked her out. She’s depressed because of him.

“But she’s driving me crazy with all her barking! She’s anxious lately. She barks because she’s little and she’s scared. The dark scares her and everything that moves in the mountain. And she’s even more anxious every time she sees Joshua. I don’t know if I can take it anymore. Dona is driving me crazy.”

-Dror

Free thoughts, no penny

Blinking lights and piercing rings: sensory overload. Add people mulling aimlessly between machines, and the smell of stale carpet. Nothing quite like a casino. Everyone is here for free money, or at least money that costs less to make than the kind of money a job yields. Invest two dollars, make away with forty. Manual labor: minimal. Excitement at the prospect of being the one to hit the jackpot: priceless. Everyone here is filled with the kind of manic hope that could gel into a solution to all their problems. All I can think about is how I don’t have enough peanut butter to last me the rest of the week.

I rediscovered my love for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches earlier last week when I purchased a loaf of potato bread and spread it with strawberry jelly and Jiffy. It tasted like eleventh grade. This is all that I have to show for my week off from school: bread and old memories. Like how we used to make sandwiches in your kitchen in Playa del Rey, and how you knew I liked mine full of color even though I didn’t like a lot of mustard. And how I used to take yoga with Tim. And how I used to go for late-night swims with Lindsay and company, slightly less than sober. What should I do with all these memories? Where do they go? They knock around in my head, but they’re so much more than entertainment. I want to know what to do with them. I channel them into the photos I take, the art I make, but that’s only part of the process. I don’ t know what to do with my photos either.

The highlight of my week off was deep cleaning my bathroom. The shine off of my bathtub makes me smile. What does this have to do with being in a casino? Nothing, it’s just a glimpse into my head. Because whenever I’m standing somewhere, I’m only half present. My thoughts could be as far away as the year after yesterday. I’m easily one of those crazies who chuckle aloud to themselves in public. And yet, I’m entirely reliable. I’m also restless and spacey when nobody is looking. I knock around in my own head, but I am so much more than just entertainment. I want to know what to do with myself. You see how I worked that in there?

I won nothing at the casino, probably because the entire establishment could smell my disdain for it. I give no love, I get no love. Metaphor for life? I also only invested four dollars into the machines, one of which wasn’t even mine. I was perfectly content to walk away. On the ride back to flat and dusty Sacramento, countryside rolling to my right, freeway stretching to my left, I thought about a good amount of nothing. I absorbed colors and images instead, filing them away for future use. I came up with this theory a few years ago: the more I see, the more I have in my writing arsenal. I guess maybe that’s what all my memories are good for too, stories and vignettes. That’s dissatisfying though, because they’re bigger than words on a page and pages in a book. Tell me what to do with them.

-Leila

Stumbling out of her frame a little on the night it’s allowed

“There were more people last year,” my friend Miri told me as we got started walking down Ben Yehuda street amongst all the other young people dressed in costumes. There sure are a lot of identical hats, I thought to myself looking around, I expected more creativity. And then I turned my head to the street before me. “Whoa!” There was a swarm of heads and hats in an endless crowd.

This was Purim, a holiday I never participated in as an American Jew because I came from a largely secular family, never went to Jewish school, and only belonged to a temple when I was too old for costumes and Purim festivals. I never celebrated Halloween either, my mother found it too dangerous and spooky for her taste. Here I was, at twenty four, dressed as an African savage (I think classic anthropology may be getting to my head) in what felt like a whole city of excited costume wearers. There was nothing traditional or spiritual about it, nor did I feel a sense of Jewish history in this celebrating holy city. This was a party. This was going to be everything I was disappointed not to find on New Years eve in Jerusalem. I knew that what lie ahead are a great deal of drinkers and later (as proved to be true) obnoxious drunks. Oy Vey, I thought to myself, have I really gotten so old that I am having these thoughts?

And so played out my first Purim in Israel.

What I won’t forget from that night was what I found when I got home. Was it a drunk and rowdy roommate? The love of my life? A robbed apartment? No, my dear audience. I found a pair of Maayan’s work boots lying in the middle of the kitchen.

Maayan is the organized roommate, the one who initiated the cleaning schedule and chores, the one who called us to a meeting where she tactfully and sweetly asked us to be more considerate about leaving sticky things, yucky things,cluttering things or crumbs around; the one who is not so fond of messiness. And it was this one, this pottery studying kibbutznik roommate, who left her muddied and white stain splattered work boots lying in the kitchen as if she had taken them off in a hurry.

I turned to Simha, the only roommate awake, who was sitting on the couch. He saw me smiling and said, “I know,” smiling back.

“That’s so cute,” I said (I often find myself being a lot girlier than I want to believe I am). We gave each other some more looks and giggled a bit. “I wonder what happened,” I said.

“She also left the kettle with cleaning detergent and a sponge in the sink.” he pointed out. It really did look like she was in the middle of cleaning the kettle when something interrupted her.

“Looks sexy,” I said.

In the morning, while I was making my way from the shower to my bedroom across the hall, Maayan appeared from her room and wished me a just-waking-up “good morning” rubbing her eyes. A few seconds later I heard her rushing back to the hallway toward her room.

“I must have been really drunk last night,” she said giggling abashed, “ I left my shoes in the middle of the kitchen!” “How embarrassing.”

I laughed and told her that Simha and I noticed last night and that it was really cute to find them there. She put the shoes in her room red faced and smiling, hoping all will be forgotten by the end of the day. I never got to hear what happened. She might really have just been drunk and clumsy as she came home and made her way to bed that night. Someone else may have started cleaning the kettle. She may not remember.

While this isn’t the most fascinating of events in our apartment, it left something in me. I keep remembering those shoes on the kitchen floor and smiling to myself. The shoes-left-in-the kitchen said so much about Maayan’s character and what is within and without its framework, and they gave me an opportunity to discover how much affection I have for this character.

-Dror