the 90th minute

HamuDA

2008-09-07T19:24:00.003+03:00

The smunch is a whopping 1 year old! That's as of last Wednesday - though her Hebrew birthday isn't for about two more weeks, leaving her in (take your pick:) a) confused birthday limbo, b) thrilled extended festivities or (pick me, pick me! as Annoying Donkey says) c) continued absolute non-awareness that there is such a thing as a birthday).

She has recently been doing more standing on her own two feet, though only for a few seconds at a time so far. I kind of feel like I'm one of those spoilsports at a magic show when she does it - I keep looking for the trick, thinking that she must be leaning against something (as she had been in the past), but I have so far been unable to spot the invisible strings, so she must be pretty talented.

Today she discovered that she can fit into a closet we have in the dining area (which, fortunately has nothing in the bottom section on the side she discovered), and she had a really great time climbing in and out of the closet and playing with the closet door. Pictures to come. Very smunchy!

Completely unrelatedly, I find it interesting that in Israel people ask about the child's sex in a way they wouldn't and couldn't in the U.S. because of the strictures of the language, in which - as with many other languages - you can't say much without knowing whether the person in question is male or female. Although they sometimes assume a baby is a particular sex (generally male, whether for reasons of male linguistic default issues or chauvinist male favoritism issues is unclear) or ask directly whether it's a boy or a girl ("ben o bat"?), they often pop the question by asking: Is it a cutie (hamud - for boys), or is it a cutie (hamuda - for girls)?

This latter method can also be used by the parent when people assume the kid is a boy. The baby-commenters say, "Eizeh hamud!" (what a [male] cutie) - to which the appropriate response when the boy in question is not one is: "hamuDA."

Cruisin' along and saying goodbye (is this a blues song or what?)

2008-07-30T01:11:00.010+03:00

The main Smunch update is that she's been "cruising" the last coupla weeks, which is apparently the official term for coffee table-assisted walking.

She's also definitely begun dancing, which is the term I am generously using for waving her hands around when I turn on the music. I notice, though, that once it's on she doesn't seem to relate to it most of the time - she primarily responds in that first minute of its being on.

RP, who is almost 11 months old, has also become more proficient at waving goodbye. She started waving a while ago, but would practice her newfound skill quite indiscriminately, with no evident connection to whether there was anyone to wave to, and frequently with both hands at the same time. Now she often waves bye-bye, which is, of course, very smunchy. (I was surprised when the nurse at the tipat halav/well-baby clinic asked if R waves yet - I didn't realize it was a quasi-official action, like rolling over. Sure, it's a physical capability as well as a form of communication [though for RP it was the former before it became the latter], but my impression is that parents teach their kids to wave mainly because, well, it looks cute.)

When I pick her up from day care, she usually smiles and/or crawls over to me, but yesterday she not only smiled at me but waved hello to me, and then raised her arms for me to pick her up. And today she waved hello at a neighbor kid when he came by to play with her. I haven't explicitly taught her to wave hello as I have to wave goodbye (mainly on the way out of day care), but I do wave hello to her regularly in the house, kind of as a way of making contact if, say, she's playing on one side of the living room while I'm on the computer on the other side.

Oh, and here's a really big one (but I'm a bit restrained about it because I'm still awaiting confirmation): On Shabbat she accompanied a waved goodbye with what sounded very much like a spoken "bye-bye"! I admit she did do this twice in a row, so it's quite possible she really did utter her first word. (!) But being ever reluctant to announce a new development without being absolutely sure of it, I am withholding final judgment until I hear her do it again. (What can I do, I like to make sure I have my facts straight - not the worst trait in the world for a journalist.)

In general, over the last few months she has become a bit more choosy about who she will be friends with. She used to bestow a great big grin on anybody who crossed her path, but now she prefers to take a more considered approach, and often likes to have some warm-up time with the new person in my or W's presence. After a few minutes, though, she's usually fine (especially if she's not particularly tired or hungry). The flip side is that she has really started to recognize the people she does know, and now lights up when her babysitter walks in the door, which is nice to see. With the neighbor kid, she already showed signs of recognition the second time (in two days) that he stopped by.

It seems nuts that she's almost a year old! That's so, like, huge!

Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you

2008-07-30T00:38:00.004+03:00

It seems like my attempt last year at doing an end run around the maternity clothing scam (er, industry) has backfired. At the time, I thought I was getting away with not buying a whole new wardrobe because I already had a lot of loose summer clothing that could fit my expanding belly. A year later, I look at my closet and all I see are what now look to me like maternity clothes.

Now I am constantly paranoid (realistic?) about people making incorrect assumptions when they see me in the same loose tops that I bought in regular people stores and that, in some cases, I had worn for years beforehand, but that they may remember as having housed a larger me this time last year - or that just look like pretty much anything could be hiding in there.

I am usually a privacy fanatic who has difficulty understanding women (and sometimes men) who feel compelled to share all around the dinner table, but lately I have wanted to wear a sign around my neck saying, "This isn't maternity clothing! I bought it in a regular store, I swear!"

I supposed if I had washboard abs I could start showing them off, but I never have and I have no reason to believe I ever will, so that's not really an option.

Every time I listen to the part of me that says it's dumb to obsess about this and I should just wear whatever's in my closet and to hell with what people may or may not think, I end up imagining/seeing seemingly knowing or wondering looks or hearing comments that just may be overly solicitous.

So what's a girl to do? Maybe I should just stay home and crank up the A/C. (But wait, I did that when I was nine months pregnant! Oy vey, can't win...)

Zero hour

2008-06-24T19:01:00.011+03:00

In my never-ending quest for Internet access that actually provides me access to the Internet (shocking demand! shocking!), I had the privilege today of overhearing a conversation between the Netvision guy and the Hot chick that revealed a certain confusion on the part of said chick regarding the difference between Hebrew and English and did not do much to raise my estimation of her company as a whole.

Netvision guy Anan, the first Israeli I have encountered who bears the Hebrew version of the flower child/American Indian-sounding name Cloud, took me patiently through a whole lotta steps to figure out what the problem was and concluded that the router was faulty and needed to be replaced. Then he called back and said he needed to make sure it wasn't the modem after all, which entailed a conference call with Hot.

When he finally got the brains of tech support on the phone, he asked her to do an "ipus" (איפוס - pronounced ee-pooss) of the modem. Since she showed little indication of understanding what he meant, he changed the form of the word to ask her "le'apes" (לאפס - to reset) it. Both words come from אפס (effes), the Hebrew for zero. (Morfix translates לאפס as: to calibrate, to zero, to set on zero; to reset.)

The Hot representative clearly had no clue what the hell Cloud was on about (maybe she couldn't check the dictionary because she couldn't get online either?), so she insisted that whatever he was asking was impossible and attempted to make it clear that she knew just what she was doing. She did this by adopting that tone of righteous indignation, replete with a declaration of her experience in the field, that I can recognize from a mile away as a clear sign that the person doesn't have the slightest idea of what to do and, more dangerous still, will never, ever admit it.

"I didn't just start working here yesterday, and I can tell you that there is no such thing," Hot insisted. After a bit of back and forth along these lines, she finally figured out that Anan - whose name, despite its airy-fairyness, puts me in mind of a good cuppa joe, thanks to a certain unnamed world body - wanted her to reset the modem.

"Oh, la'asot [to do] reeeeset!" she said. And then, I kid you not, she went on to ask: "Why don't you speak in Hebrew?"

Anan sounded as taken aback as I was. "Ipus is Hebrew," he informed her. "Reset is English."

Not surprisingly, given the admirable personality traits she had already demonstrated, Ms. Hot blithely continued as though Anan had not pointed out what a total lamebrain she was, and finally accomplished the task.

Conclusion: It turns out that both the router and the Hot representative are faulty.

Vertical new world

2008-06-10T19:18:00.006+03:00

I said in my last post that I could easily see Rimonit pulling herself up... in another couple of months. And I was right... but way off-base; she started pulling herself up the Shabbat before last.

Over the past week and a half, she has stood up by leaning over a couch cushion placed on the floor, by holding on to the coffee table and holding on to her high chair, and by leaning against the back or side of the couch.

A couple of days ago I thought I could sneak in a quick catnap by resting on the bed in the guestroom while she played on the floor of the most Rimonit-friendly (read: empty) room in the house, but the kid had other ideas. I had only just closed my eyes when I noticed that there was a little head peering over the top of the bed, the big blue eyes about even with mine. My incipient rest was disturbed by a mysterious sensation of having my hair tugged just before a little elf tried to steal my glasses right off my face. I looked down and for the first time was able to apply the concept of "height" to the suddenly vertical being next to me. It was a bit of a weird sensation. Wonder if I fell asleep after all and was only dreaming...

RP update: The dog we never had

2008-06-03T23:17:00.010+03:00

The kid started doing some serious crawling last week. She now bears a great resemblance to the dog we never had: She crawls under the table and eats shoes (yum!). She also loves books and newspapers (rustle, rustle!), meaning that she is eating her words before she can even utter them.

She had started moving forward a couple of paces on all fours two weeks ago, and did that for a few days before really taking off on her hands and knees.

And although I said in a previous post that she was getting in some top teeth, they didn't start actually breaking through the gums until this week, in a not particularly fun experience. :( On the bright side, RP has also chosen this week to fall head over heels in love with her reflection, so any time she gets upset (say, once the teeth start hurting but before the Acamoli kicks in), all we have to do is bring her to a mirror, and behold: an instantaneous transformation from crying Rimonit to smiling, loquacious Rimonit, who immediately begins a conversation with herself that almost inevitably begins and ends with "da."

I can also see a marked increase in Smunch communication skills, commensurate with her newfound ambulatory abilities. Now instead of staying in place and crying if she's hungry, tired or wants to be picked up (usually because she's hungry, tired or both), she crawls over to me to hand-deliver the message and pulls on whatever article of my clothing she can reach to get my attention. A couple of weeks ago, she did this partway, crawling (well, scooting on her tummy at the time) to her stroller, which was midway between me and her, and giving me the most pitiable, hangdog look through the mesh of the stroller basket. So I caved in and gave her a doggie biscuit. (Just kidding, savtas!)

The kid, who just turned nine months old, has also shown signs of wanting to reach further still. The other day I was sitting on the couch-bed in the guest room, trying to do some work on the laptop while she played on the floor. When she had enough of this arrangement, she did not satisfy herself with crawling to the edge of the bed and making her appeal from there, but knelt on her knees to give herself the most height and reached up as high as she could to make sure I had heard her plea. It's not hard for me to imagine her pulling herself up in another couple of months.

The smunch has been getting herself to sitting position for a while now, I would say about a month or so. She isn't yet able to sit herself up if she is lying flat on her back, but she gets herself into sitting mode from the all-fours position. She started doing this when she was still in crawl training camp. But when she's tired she sometimes just can't hold herself up anymore and will fall over from a sitting position or repeatedly lay her head down for a few seconds in mid-play.

Two weeks ago Rimonit started clapping (applause!), but I have yet to work out if she does it for any specific reason. Sometimes she does it when she hears music, but other times there doesn't seem to be a particular cause. If she starts clapping and I clap in imitation, I sometimes merit a big smile. I've also been trying to teach her to wave in the appropriate situations (mostly when leaving day care), but that doesn't seem to have caught on yet. I have the feeling that now is a good time to start teaching her sign-language signs for certain key words (food, drink, more, enough), but I'm not comfortable enough with what the signs are myself. I know I could just make it up, but I'd like the signs to be recognizable by others as well so that she can communicate with them too and not just with me.

Over the last few weeks I have also really seen a difference in her understanding of the concept of object permanence. She now can really appreciate peekaboo (called "kookoo" in Hebrew), giving me a big grin when I pop out of hiding, and when her toy drops off the changing table she tries to dive off to get it back instead of just forgetting about its existence as soon as it disappears from view.

As for food, I have been giving her a mix of baby cereal (so far, rice cereal and kasha cereal) and actual pieces of food (white potato, sweet potato, carrots, corn, banana, rye bread, pear, skinless red and yellow pepper) that she can pick up and eat with her hands. Sometimes she is more willing to eat with a spoon and other times she prefers to use her hands, so I try to offer her both at every (attempted) meal. I have also just started trying to get her to drink from a cup. She drinks from it fine if she lets me hold it for her, but if she wants to hold it herself there is the small problem that she likes to hold it upside down just as much as rightside up. I am also trying a sippy cup, which she enjoys putting in her mouth the right way, but I'm not convinced she is actually getting anything out of it.

And that, folks, is RP in a nutshell at this moment in time. No doubt by the time you read this she will have changed in a dozen more ways.

Doing the crawl

2008-05-11T20:57:00.015+03:00

[Photo: Rimonit appearing to be in need of a rescue from her cousin's embrace.]

RP is on the forward march. She has been consistently creeping/slithering/scooting forward, as well as practicing the crawl position, since Wednesday night - Erev Yom Ha'atzmaut which, if you'll permit me a moment of pretentious melodrama, was also the eve of Rimonit's burgeoning independence.

For those unfamiliar with the pre-crawl crawl, just think of a snake with arms and legs. She kind of propels herself forward with her legs and forearms, though she sometimes goes backwards when she appears to have intended to move forward. Actually, what she most looks like is a swimmer doing the crawl on dry land.

But although doing the crawl should not be confused with actually crawling, it's clear the next phase is imminent, as Rimonit has set herself a consistent training regimen to get her in gear for crawling. Not wanting to give too much away, she has refused to reveal the deadline by which she plans to reach her goal. However, observers note that regularly getting on all fours is a pretty sure sign of impending crawlingness, even if for the time being it is succeeded by a collapse to the floor and a blithe return to one's previous preoccupation (namely, getting to the TV cords).

It's pretty cool to see her sight an object of interest and then swim toward it ponderously, with conscious intent, effort visible in every movement. I know that it won't be long before she'll be moving around with even greater ease, but for now I'm having fun watching her steady progression, which somehow manages to be simultaneously incremental and lightning-fast.

You win some, you lose some

2008-05-07T11:51:00.011+03:00

On the one hand...

Givatayim and Ramat Gan have a style of Yom Ha'atzmaut decorations I never noticed in Jerusalem. In J'lem, there are flags decorating the windows of apartments, which are put up by individual tenants, there are decorations that companies or government ministries put up on their buildings, and there are the municipal decorations in the streets. Another type that I haven't seen over there but I've seen a lot in Givatayim/Ramat Gan (including outside our building) is blue and white decor put up by the va'ad bayit (building committee) of large apartment buildings - meaning that not only are the individual apartments all flagged up as per tenant discretion, but so is the facade of the whole building. For instance, the walkway leading from the street to our building's front door is festooned with blue and white ribbons, and the new 20+ story buildings across the street have blue and white ribbons running down the outside of the building.

Not sure if the increased va'ad bayit participation in Yom Ha'atzmaut that I am seeing in the TA region has any significance whatsoever, but it's been interesting to observe the differences. It's probably just because there are more tall apartment buildings here. It might also be a function of the va'ad bayit being more involved, kind of like a condo board maybe? (But fortunately without the selection criteria, for the most part.)

On the other hand...

I was rather surprised to see two Jews for Jesus guys handing out pamphlets on a corner in Givatayim yesterday. Didn't say anything to them. I always kind of feel like I'm supposed to say/do something, but what? Tell them Jews don't believe in human deities? Gee, I'm sure they've never heard that before. Once in NY I took their pamphlet and ripped it up in front of them and walked on, but what good did that do?

Final score: Laurel for the building decor, Dart for J4J (to use Targum terminology). Givatayim comes out even.

Stop the presses!

2008-05-04T18:56:00.005+03:00

While at work this evening, I received an urgent report from the husband manning the Home Front, to wit: Rimonit has crawled! Forward, no less!

I have not actually witnessed this exciting phenomenon yet, but I am told by sources familiar with the case that the incident in question was precipitated by the shrimp's inability to resist the lure of rustling paper being filed. Compelled to do some crinkling herself, she lifted her tummy off the floor and moved forward an inch, dropping down in exhaustion. As the "crumple crumple" sound continued (hey, is that an onomatopoeia, or merely an entrenched mental association? hmm, something to ponder...), she kept up her belly flops until reaching her clamorous goal. Can't wait to see for myself...

This is her third major milestone in the last two to three weeks alone:
- She just got her first tooth - and already she's sprouting what look like three more (one more on the bottom, next to the first one, two on the top)
- She can sit unsupported (which she did for about an hour and a half on Shabbat, quietly playing on her own!!)
- She has added the backwards slither to her repertoire of rolling all over the place (well, mostly toward the TV cords) and pivoting in a circle (a combo that enables her to get wherever she wants, even without the crawl).

She just turned eight months old yesterday.

Getting a lift

2008-04-29T19:23:00.013+03:00

We spent part of Pesach in Jerusalem, leading me to come up with a few counterbalances to my arguable over-sentimentalization of life in the Holy City (though I continue to stand behind everything I said here):

1. Doing things we would normally have done if we had still been living in J'lem (hanging out with friends and taking advantage of free holiday activities - which unexpectedly led to the acquisition of a shockingly purple necklace made out of melon seeds!) is relaxing and vacationesque when you're staying at somebody else's apartment (thank you, R&S and B!) - even if you know the very same activities would have been somewhat more mundane if you had been staying in your (alas, imaginary) Jerusalem home, complaining about having nothing to eat aside from matzah and jelly.

2. Speaking of that imaginary Jerusalem apartment, our stay in the big J brought home the unsettling realization that the roomy elevator we have started to take for granted in our building here in Yuppieville would be a mere wisp of a dream in most buildings back yonder. I used to scoff at those under-70s who purported to need an elevator merely to reach the grand heights of the fifth floor. Even when I was pregnant and the arrival of a little one loomed quite close on the horizon, I haughtily figured - to the minimal extent I thought about it at all - that we could just park the stroller at the bottom and carry the kid up, no problem. And also that all those wusses out there were making a big deal out of not very much.

That, of course, was then - before I knew about the magical sleep-inducing properties of strolling. Yes, I had heard stories about parents putting their baby in the car to get the kid to sleep, but I had not yet experienced up close the full power of Motion the Magic Potion. This is no theoretical concept anymore, but a very real law of nature - which, like gravity, just is, regardless of whether you understand it - and RP exhibits its sway on her at least once a day. But here's the key: If I'm to get anything out of her tendency to capitulate to the charms of what Warren insists on calling The Chariot, then I need to bring her back home and let her continue her slumber indoors, so I can eat lunch/do the laundry/check my email/take a catnap. This is easy when you have an elevator - but significantly less so, as I saw firsthand last week, when you've got a whole lotta stairs separating the snoozer from the house.

And elevator absence is just one element of the bigger picture: the serious tradeoff involved in living in a city, where - to relegate a huge quality-of-life issue to four words - space is sacrificed for location (unless you've got a few million bucks, in which case you can a) have both and b) probably don't even live in Israel, but just deign to visit during the holidays while insouciantly pricing actual Israelis out of Jerusalem... but that's another story).

3. Too many Americans in Jerusalem!!!!! I constantly complained about this when I lived there and was quite forcefully reminded of it upon my return. I did not leave America in order to feel like I never left!

A conversation I would never have had in J'lem

2008-04-14T17:09:00.004+03:00

I'm still fielding calls from people who saw my signs looking for a babysitter, and I had a brief unexpected conversation today with a woman named Esther. After we discussed the kind of hours I'm looking for (since I can use as many backups as I can get) and I made it clear that I don't currently need someone for the regular gig, she added, in a kind of hesitatant tone: "Well, you should just know that I'm religious."

I was rather taken aback that she would feel the need to point this out and said, "Okay, so am I." She said that was good because some people were bothered by having a religious babysitter. What can I say but "??!!!" I am definitely going to interrogate her about this further - if she decides to keep our meeting, of course (see Tip #1).

Pretty wacked out, hey? I wonder if babysitters in Jerusalem feel the need to tell potential employers that they're not religious. I am saddened but intrigued...

Leave the lemon at the door

2008-04-13T21:31:00.011+03:00

Recent experience (the direct result of my main babysitter being in the middle of exams) has led me to come up with a coupla hot tips for anyone looking to get paid to watch a kid (known in literary Hebrew as being a babyseeeeter [ בייביסיטר], though in a pinch an actual Hebrew word - metapelet [ מטפלת] - will do too.)

Tip #1. Show up.

This may be one of those things that seem kind of, well, obvious, but I have had no less than three women claiming to want to be paid to (in part) show up at a specific time, like for instance, when I need to leave for work. And yet they have proven this desire by... not showing up. And don't think they called to cancel, I might add.

Tip #2. It wouldn't kill you to smile.

So I admit it was a bit of an awkward situation. On Friday I agreed pretty much right away to take on the first babysitter I had spoken to who I really liked. She was at our apartment, where she had come so I could meet her and she could meet the kid. All was going well - and then the next interviewee showed up. I had thought I spaced them far enough apart, but the first one stayed longer than expected and the second came earlier than expected and, well, you know how it is (both of them apparently read Tip #1).

There are people who take a non-ideal situation well, but Applicant II was not one of them. In fact, I've never met anyone who fit the description "sourpuss" quite as precisely as she did.

She wasn't showing much of a happy face when I opened the door, and after I explained the situation in the most diplomatic way I could (including the fact that I had already picked the other girl to be my main alternate, but that I was always looking for other babysitters to keep in the pipeline), she went into serious bad sport mode, making these bitter comments the whole time. Like, "Well, I would have thought you'd want a mother." (The babysitter I chose is 20 and living with her parents.) And, after catching a glimpse of her: "She's obviously not very experienced, but whatever." And then, as she was about to walk out the door, "So do you think you made the right decision?" Well, if I hadn't been sure before you opened your mouth, boy was I sure as soon as you did.

Anyway, my new babysitter has only done her duty once as yet (tonight), but so far she's met both of my strict criteria. Not to mention, the kid didn't cry but did eat and sleep! Let's hear it for the first native Israeli (and an Iraqi yet) to be named Lynn! Eh, excuse me, Leeeeeeen. (No joke!)

Dreaming of strawberries

2008-03-04T23:07:00.005+02:00

By all accounts, I have recently moved up in the world. In August, I left the poorest city in the country for a city considered to be fairly high up there on the socioeconomic scale, earning a Central Bureau of Statistics ranking of eight out of 10. Every Israeli who hears of my new hometown says, "Ohhhh, Givatayim!" – with much the same intonation a fashion aficionado might use in checking out your new sweater and exclaiming, "Ohhhh, Versace!"

And now that winter has arrived, I can take pleasure in leaving the house with no more than a light jacket, for even as residents of the Tel Aviv area complain about their low-key version of cold, I know that I have left behind some shivering friends huddled inside the stone buildings of the capital.

Why, then, do I miss Jerusalem so much?

Part of it has to do with the section of Jerusalem I used to inhabit: the colorful and constantly changing neighborhood of Nachlaot, whose narrow alleyways are populated by neo-hippies, art students and Mizrahi families who have lived there for decades. The neighborhood is enlivened, and perhaps even defined, by its proximity to the steaming-fresh pitas and pungent spices that form part of the intoxicating bustle of the Mahaneh Yehuda market, known as the shuk.

Back when I lived in Nachlaot, I had only to step five minutes away from my front door in order to scout out whichever fruit was in season, be it succulent green grapes or bright orange persimmons. Seduced by the heady aroma of blood-red strawberries as they lay heaped on their wooden beds in the vendors' stalls, we would feast on them for a scant NIS 5 a kilo, the cut-rate price they reached by the time the strawberry season was coming to a close. When the strawberries first hit my supermarket in Givatayim this year, I thought I would get two small containers – but when the price came to NIS 56, I left them at the cashier's counter.

Living so close to the shuk made me feel connected to the agrarian cycle in a way I never had when growing up amid the sterile supermarkets of New Jersey, where it seemed that almost any food item could be purchased at any time of year. When my husband and I were living near the shuk, our Shabbat meals often revolved around whatever was in season – making it hard to plan ahead, but easy to get inspired by particularly good-looking green beans or mango (or both, mixed together in a rice recipe conjured up on the spot).

As I did back then, now too I generally get my groceries at the closest available location; but now that means I have to step into the Givatayim Mall just to pick up some tomatoes, cucumbers and milk in the Mega Ba'ir supermarket, where everything seems orderly and plasticized. The rice and lentils come in standard plastic packaging instead of being shoveled out of burlap sacks; the mint leaves, sealed inside a plastic bag, don't threaten to inundate the other groceries with their scent. There are no vendors about to burst shoppers' eardrums with the sound of their price wars, and I have not yet had to swerve to avoid running into a man balancing a large tray of pita bread on his head. In short, doing the shopping has become a perennial disappointment, instead of an occasional revelation.

As I reluctantly make the shift from shuk culture to mall culture, I am regularly reminded of some of the other reasons I miss Jerusalem. The capital is much maligned for its failure to truly unite its eastern and western halves, despite insisting on pro forma unification - but for all that, there is a sense of heterogeneity in Jerusalem that is sorely lacking in the ostensibly more liberal center of the country. Walk through Sacher Park on a Saturday when it's not too cold or rainy, as I did so many times, and you will likely see several soccer games going on; if you go closer, you will hear that some are being conducted in Hebrew and others in Arabic. Keep an eye out for the Sri Lankan foreign workers playing cricket in the afternoon, and step between the secular families grilling kebabs and the religious ones out for a Shabbat stroll.

My all-too-frequent forays to the Givatayim Mall, by contrast, reveal a depressing sameness. It's not just that 97.3 percent of the city is Jewish, according to the statistics bureau. It is also that, unlike in Jerusalem, so many seem to fit the same mold. Well-groomed mothers in their 30s wheeling Bugaboos – in other words, upper-middle-class suburban Yuppies – proliferate, sipping café hafuch with a friend or browsing through expensive jewelry. And that's fine, for those who want it.

But went I left the stifling suburbia of my youth, I wanted to be in that Israel of old (or perhaps just of legend) where simplicity trumps materialism, where sun-bleached sandals are acceptable footwear for any occasion. And to some extent, that's what I found in Jerusalem, not because – as many Tel Avivians would like to believe – Jerusalemites are country bumpkins, but because the capital's population is so diverse that just about anyone can find a niche there.

For now, though, I'm making the best of my stay in Givatayim, and dreaming of strawberries.

Getting a head start

2008-01-17T16:46:00.002+02:00

Just a bit of wisdom from Rimonit's day-care center:

When I went to drop her off the other day (she started last week and hangs out there for three to four hours a day), I noticed a laminated paper on the floor with all the other toys. It had a picture of a colorful parrot, beneath which were the words, in English: "How many color does it hold?"

Fortunately, all that Rimonit (now four and a half months old!) cares about right now is, "Will it fit into my mouth so I can drool all over it?" (Or, as the authors of the ostensibly educational game might have said, "How many drool can hold one little mouth?")

Ah, well, it's good to know Israelis are getting a head start on how to speak pidgin - or should that be parrot? - English...

Little Fat-face

2007-10-03T07:26:00.001+02:00

Haven't posted in quite a while. In the interim, I've moved to Givatayim (part of the Tel Aviv area known as the Disgustingly Humid Belt) and had a baby girl (Rimonit Penina).

Bath time with RPKW.

Herewith, some FAQs:

Okay, so now we know her name. But what are you actually going to call her?

I don't really get this question, but it's a very common one, so I will attempt to answer it. Umm, we were kind of thinking we'd try calling her by her name. And no, not the whole double-barrelled thing, just Rimonit. What people seem to mean by this question is, 'How will you shorten her name so that it bears no semblance to the original but takes half a second less to say?' All I can tell you is that the only name-related nickname I've tried so far is Rimoniti. For those of you gasping in wonder at the thought that such a nickname is even longer than the original, let me point out that a three-syllable appellation (with an optional fourth syllable add-on) is really not that long! My name, for instance, has three syllables, and both Warren and I have four-syllabled sisters named Daniella - but despite such a terrible setback imposed so early in life, we've somehow all managed to pull through so far.

What do you mean by 'name-related nickname'? What other nicknames do you have?

The kid gets stuck with a new nickname almost as often as she goes out to her favorite 24-hour diner. Which leads me to a couple of eating-related nicknames for the squirt: Insatiable Munchkin (alternate form: Munching Munchkin) and Little Fat-face. Warren likes Thing-a-Ling, among others - a throwback to her fetal days, when she was just Thing (and particularly suited, in a bad haiku sort of way, to her being carried around in a sling). Warren's mother, who managed to time her arrival in Israel to coincide with the day of the birth, tends to go for Bubbaloo. (Don't ask me, she's South African.)

What are her vital stats?

She weighed 3.26 kilos at birth, which comes to somewhere around 7 pounds. (A month later, she is now more than 4 kilos. I don't remember how much more, but I did write it down somewhere.) She was born at 1:57 P.M. (that's 13:57 Israel time) on Monday, September 3, chaf Elul, via natural birth. There's probably other random bits of data I'm supposed to have memorized, but I'm not sure what that might be. And before you ask, I have no idea how many inches long she was - why exactly do you need to know??

Wait a second, is Rimonit actually a name?

Yeah, well, if it wasn't before, then it is now.

What does it mean?

It's a feminized form of 'rimon,' which means 'pomegranate.'

Okay, but why Rimonit?

Mostly because I was walking back from work one day several months ago and thinking that it was too bad we couldn't name the kid something Rosh Hashana-related, since we knew Thing would be born around then and that would at least narrow the sobriquet search. My inner dialogue went something like this: 'I mean, what are we gonna call it? Shofar? Or how about Tekia if it's a girl, Shevarim if it's a boy?' (Yes, I have sarcastic inner dialogue, and yes, we really didn't know what we were having until it popped out.) Then my mind kind of drifted to the Shivat Haminim (Seven Species), whereupon the sarcasm returned, in the form of: 'Yeah, Chita (Wheat), that would be a great name. It would go over really well in English too. Nothing like having a kid known to the world as Cheetah.' But then I went through the list and came upon Rimon and turned it into Rimonit and just kinda decided that that would be a really cool name. Bonus points for pomegranates being a fruit traditionally eaten on Rosh Hashana, to symbolize that we ask for our merits to be as numerous as the seeds of the pomegranate. I suggested the name to Warren shortly thereafter, making sure to intersperse it in unrelated conversations to get his mind used to the idea. The ploy worked: The name grew on Warren. And if you are not one of those with the good taste to love the name Rimonit at first hear, then it will surely grow on you too. (Anyway, it's better than Napoleon Alexander, which was Warren's father's first choice for the boy he was sure we would have.)

Well, since you clearly haven't named her after some relative called Rimonit, then who was Penina?

My great-grandmother Babi Penina, aka Babi Pepi - my mother's mother's mother.

Okay, now how about her last name. Er, what is her last name exactly?

Let's start at the beginning: Both Warren and I have the same names post-wedding as we did pre-wedding, meaning that I'm still a Kordova and he's still a Wienburg. We decided that for simplicity's sake, Rimonit would have only one last name, which would be Wienburg. However, I also wanted her to be a Kordova kid, so we decided to make Kordova her middle name, making the kid Rimonit Penina Kordova Wienburg (or as Warren occasionally refers to her in emails, RPKW). Unfortunately, Israeli birth certificates do not ask about middle names, so we were forced to list Kordova as her third first name and remain stalwart in our hope that she not grow up too confused.

UPDATE: We have since received her birth certificate in the mail and surprise, surprise, the Kordova is missing. A tangle with the bureaucratic powers that be awaits. (Yippee!)

I'm it

2007-07-11T12:47:00.000+03:00

I've been tagged by Live From Israel to respond to the blog equivalent of chain mail - in this case, a list of 8 facts/habits about myself. However, since this is, after all, my blog, I'm going to bend the rules a little (a lot?) and not post the original rules, tag anyone else or provide the requested number of responses. Oh, and also, I'm gonna answer a completely different question.

Herewith, 4 foods I like to eat (or, if you're a traditionalist, 4 facts/habits about me, as pertains to my eating lifestyle):

1. Cherry tomatoes (preferably fresh from the garden, but straight from the shuk is good too)

2. Chocolate chips (and please don't dilute them with milk, I want the bittersweet kind. Oh, and none of that "white chocolate" crap either. I don't know who invented that oxymoron, but calling a substance chocolate when it doesn't have any chocolate in it just may be the food scam of the century. Hmm, I wonder if those Nigerian spammers started it? You know, "Just wire me all your money and I promise to send you some white chocolate in return." And the inevitable response: "Gee, that sounds like a great deal, I better call my bank right now." But I'm getting sidetracked here...)

3. Meatballs and spaghetti (preferably with pickles, extra sauce and, of course, Tropicana orange juice)

4. Mint chocolate-chip ice cream (this could also be on a list called "Foods that America should start shipping over to Israel, and pronto." I still have to restrain myself from salivating every time I see green ice cream in Israel - which in this country, bizarrely enough, signals that all-time summer fave: pistachio flavor.)

Mmm, I think I'm getting hungry...

Expecting the unexpected

2007-07-08T14:00:00.000+03:00

Being pregnant in Israel comes with its own share of what feel like only-in-Israel moments - though I confess that not having gone through the experience in any other country, I'm not actually able to compare them with not-in-Israel moments.

Fortunately, I have yet to have random strangers reaching out to touch me, a hazard I have been warned to expect - though with a couple months to go, I'm not ruling anything out.

My first random stranger experience took place in the beginning of my sixth month, when I still wasn't sure if people I didn't know could discern my, er, condition. As I was waiting for a traffic light to change in Tel Aviv, a pregnant woman joined me on the sidewalk and asked when I was due.

Somehow, the rest of the waiting time and the actual street-crossing time were long enough for her to let me know that it seems everyone she was in school with is now expecting a child and, moreover, that now that she too has swallowed a watermelon, she's discovered pregnant women sticking out (belly first?) of every nook and cranny.

A friend told me she wasn't surprised the exchange took place in Tel Aviv, because there are so many pregnant women in Jerusalem (which, completely coincidentally, has a very high Haredi population) that no one even looks twice in the holy city.

All the same, it was in Jerusalem that I had what I consider to be my most Israeli pregnancy moment so far.

As I was standing on the corner of my block during a recent heat wave, trying to hail a cab because it was just too hot and disgusting to walk to work, an Israeli guy strolled by, felafel in hand, all prepped to display the "Don't worry, I know what's best for you" attitude that manages to beat the laws of supply and demand. (The supply of this attitude in Israel far exceeds normal per capita needs, yet there is no demand that I can discern - has the government considered export?)

"Sister, you should stand in the shade a little!" he exhorted in Hebrew. And then, because I had clearly forgotten: "You're pregnant!"

Faffing is moreish

2007-06-21T19:26:00.000+03:00

Sometimes, being an American transplanted to Israel can generate a real culture swap - but not always from the expected sources.

I was just eating a bowl of really yummy Israeli cereal called Kinamonim, which is basically whole wheat squares covered in cinnamon and is much tastier (and probably healthier, though I haven't checked) than the American Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and thought, "Wow, this stuff is really moreish."

And then I thought back to my unenlightened days as a blissfully ignorant American in America, when - I can hardly believe it - I didn't have such a key word in my vocabulary. As you've probably already guessed, "moreish" (as in "more-ish") is what you say about a food that makes you want more of it - at least if you're British. It's kind of like the "you can't eat just one" potato chip slogan, condensed into a single versatile word - without the negative associations and just plain unoriginality of the American English equivalent, "addictive."

Another indispensable word I learned from my British former roommate that we both found ourselves using to describe our activities at pretty much any given moment is "faffing" - to "dither, futz, diddle, potter about uselessly," as this site has it. Faffing (also "faffing about," in British, which translates into "faffing around" in American) seems to be the British cousin of "futzing around," at least the way my father always used the phrase - as in, and I quote, "Stop futzing around already and get in the car!" It's also related to procrastination (a particular talent of mine), but without even requiring a task just calling out to be put off.

The thing is, even though I found "futzing" and "futzing around" on Urban Dictionary and listed as slang on other dictionary sites, the only person I can remember hearing use the word is my father, which signals that at least in my circles, it wasn't exactly popular slang. Also, I was frankly never actually sure it was a real word, especially since its Yiddish sound (though the actual derivation appears to be a bit murky - see this and this for two possibilities) seemed a bit weird coming from my Sephardi father, for whom Yiddish words and American slang are not really high on the vocabulary list.

Faffing, on the other hand, appears to be quite a popular activity among the British, making me feel at last that I am not alone.

Go here to read the recipe, which I haven't tried, for the moreish-looking cookies pictured above.

Catching the wrong fish

2007-06-14T10:13:00.000+03:00

Herewith, a note of caution: Just when you've been thinking about the rather ridiculous necessity of reading Hebrew in English, along comes a Hebrew word practically screaming to be read in English. But – what the hell? – it turns out the Israeli writer was actually speaking the language of the Hebrewman!

I was translating a news brief about the Australian movie "Jindabyne," which is going to be playing in Israel as part of an Australian film festival here over the summer.

The reporter wrote that the film was about four men who find a dead body during a מסע דיג (without vowels, the second word would read something like DYG). The phrase should, of course, be read as "masa dayig," meaning "fishing trip" – but at first glance, what jumped out at me was the English word "dig" (or "deeeg," in Israeli). In those first few seconds, I imagined four college-age guys spending their summer on an archeological dig looking for old coins – but turning up a much more (cue scary voice) sinister find. I mean come on, that could totally be a movie! It all made perfect sense.

Fortunately, though, I got a good grip on the rod of reality and realized my mistake before I fell for that old decoy trick – hook, line and sinker.

Driving me to drink

2007-06-07T12:28:00.000+03:00

My brother-in-law Yaakov has unwittingly resolved a minor mystery that has plagued me since I moved to Israel. For years I have seen stickers on car windows that say "טסט ליין" (which, given the vowel-lessness of Hebrew, transliterates roughly into "TST LYYN") and had absolutely no idea what it meant.

Although it could have passed as a bumper sticker, it didn't convey any political message that I could discern, and moreover, I wasn't even sure how to read the sticker in the first place. Since the first word is not actually a word in Hebrew as far as I know, I figured it must be English, but I was tripped up by the second word, which - even though it is written in Hebrew letters, constitutes a Hebrew word and appears all over Israel - I was dimwitted enough to actually read in Hebrew.

This left me reading the second word as "leyayin" ("for wine"), and given that context, I could only surmise that the first word was an Israeli rendering of the English word "taste." And so I reached the uneasy conclusion that the car owners with the sticker on the window were basically telling the world that they had a taste for wine.

I was a bit uncomfortable with this reading of the text, in part because, well, what kind of a statement is "taste for wine"? It's a lot more vague and a lot less fitting to pithy bumper sticker style than more formulaic messages like "I love wine" or "I'd rather be drinking." And why did the number of Israeli car owners seemingly advertising their taste for wine seem to exceed the number of Israelis who have actually developed a taste for wine?

More than that, though, the logo of the sticker - a kind of jagged line with peaks and valleys, like the results of a polygraph test (at least when shown on cop shows on TV) - really didn't seem to have anything to do with wine. I mean sure, I could make something up - the peaks represent the good wines and the valleys represent kiddush wine, for instance - but it wasn't exactly an instantly recognizable symbol of wine, like the bottle or glass you might expect if the sticker was really about a taste for wine.

And finally, I was pretty sure that "taste" would more likely be rendered into Hebrew as "טייסט," but the vagaries of transliteration are such that people can write a word from another language pretty much however they want. (It may come as no surprise that Israelis have yet to come up with a uniform transliteration for a word that appears in the newspaper daily: Palestinians. But that's another story.)

For all my hesitations, though, I couldn't come up with a better option that made any sense to me, and settled on "taste for wine" until I found a more fitting solution to the puzzle. Of course, I suppose I could have asked an Israeli, but this was one of those things that occupied my thoughts for the few seconds I caught sight of yet another of those stickers and flitted out of my head again as the car left my field of vision.

But then along came Yaakov, who wrote this blog on vehicle inspection, which happens to be held at a place called (drum roll, please) Test Line - spelled, yes, טסט ליין

When I read this, discovering in the process that my ignorance was a hitherto unforeseen disadvantage of my pedestrian lifestyle, the asimon finally dropped. (The phrase harks back to the days when Israelis used asimonim, metal tokens with holes in the middle, to make calls on pay phones.) It all seems so obvious now that the longstanding mystery threatening to drive me to drink has been resolved at long last.

Next time, at least, I'll hopefully know better than to read Hebrew signs in (gasp!) Hebrew.

Forget retail therapy

2007-05-28T14:36:00.000+03:00

Back in the old country, clothes shopping generally involved entering a store that was significantly larger than my living room and trying on clothes in a fitting room conveniently equipped with both a door and a mirror, so I could decide whether I wanted to purchase the clothing. And if I wasn't sure, I could always buy it and then return it if it didn't turn out to be what I wanted.

I'm not a huge shopper, but just thinking of such an idyllic scenario brings tears of longing to my eyes. That's because here in the Holy Land, if I don't time my shopping expeditions so they coincide with absolute wardrobe desperation, the only thing I end up getting is frustrated. Forget retail therapy - I need psychoanalysis just to recover from my shopping sprees, rare and often aborted though they are.

A couple of weeks ago, I was trying on some clothes in the designated fitting corner in the back of a store in downtown Jerusalem, which some depraved curtain-hanger had decided should pose as two dressing rooms - in much the same way that a tiny studio apartment I once saw in Nachlaot was being marketed as a 1.5-bedroom apartment because it had a bunk bed. (The reason should be obvious: the bottom bunk was the bedroom and the top bunk was the half a room.)

The two mini-cubicles of the dressing room in question, meanwhile, were more or less separated from the shopping area by two curtains, but were separated from each other by a curtain that ran only halfway down the changing area. As long as I didn't move around too much and practiced self-delusion really hard, I could almost sustain an illusion of privacy. On the plus side, I did not have to share arm space with a sink (definitely not something to be taken for granted). On the down side, there were, naturally, no mirrors on the inside of the fitting room.

I could not possibly overstate the degree to which I hate this absurd Israeli concept of walking out of the dressing room to parade around in an article of clothing that probably looks awful on you but you don't actually know because you can't see how awful it looks on you until you parade around in it in front of a whole buncha strangers, who - along with their husbands, children and pet rabbits - suddenly all seem to be staring at you.

In this case, though, I had an extra burden: Every time I stood in front of the mirror, I had to keep one eye on the clothing I had painstakingly picked out, in an effort to keep it from falling into the greedy hands of the hired harasser. Said harasser, who had the misleading title of saleslady, really, really doesn't like it when customers have the chutzpah to bring clothes into the dressing room to try them on, and was far more interested in putting away the clothes before I got a chance to figure out whether I wanted to buy them than in actually making a sale. It was like trying to eat at a restaurant when the waitress is standing with her hands on her hips in front of your table and snatching away your fork when you pause to take a sip of water. All in all, an experience I'm dying to repeat.

My sister tells me, though, that sometimes that much-desired mirror inside the fitting room can create more trouble than it's worth. She was once in a dressing room in a Jerusalem store that had a single mirror on the inside that was meant to serve two cubicles. Of course, the curtain separating the cubicles didn't quite reach the whole length between them, and to her surprise, when she looked in the mirror she found herself seeing the woman in the next cubicle undress.

But the highlight of my Israeli fitting room experience actually took place in the Malcha mall, not some hole in the wall in town. To my undying shock, a door at the back of the dressing room, which I hadn't noticed before, flew open without warning as I was changing, and a store employee strode through my cubicle and out the curtain before I could even comprehend what had just happened.

The obvious solution, of course, is to buy something without trying it on, see how it looks in the privacy of your own home, and return it if it doesn't fit right. The only problem with such a neat approach is that refunds are virtually unheard of in Israel. Most stores will, however, do you the favor of allowing you to exchange the item for something else in the same store - if, of course, you can be bothered to go looking.

And don't think it gets any better once you actually purchase something you like; the next hurdle is keeping your belongings both intact and looking new.

Take the purple flip-flops I bought Friday. It didn't take long for a bald spot to appear on the left shoe, as the decorative stripes under my big toe faded away after all of an hour or two of wearing them around the house.

I'm hoping my new flip-flops make it through the summer - but even if they don't, the good news is that at least I won't have to brave the dreaded dressing room to try on a new pair.

Blog award finals - voting closes Wed.

2007-05-15T00:07:00.000+03:00

The final round of voting in the 2007 Jewish & Israeli Blog Awards closes Wednesday, May 16, at 10 p.m. EST (5 a.m. Thursday, May 17, in Israel). If you want to vote for me, head on over to the following links:

Click here to vote for this blog in the Best New Blog category.

Click here to vote for this blog in the Best Jewish Personal Blog category.

And if you want to see all the categories, click here.

Thank you!

From black to white: the lifecycle of a mass email

2007-05-14T22:40:00.000+03:00

An email circulating in Israel last week urged Israelis to wear black on Monday, May 14, to protest the fact that the three Israeli soldiers kidnapped over the summer have still not been returned home.

The Hebrew notice attached to the email I received reads, in translation:

"14.5.07 – THE ENTIRE STATE OF ISRAEL IN BLACK

"On 14.5.07, all residents of Israel, we will wear black shirts, to protest the ten months of abduction of the Israeli soldiers.

"In July 2006, 10 months ago, Ehud Regev, Gilad Shalit and Udi Goldwasser were kidnapped. ...
Almost a year has passed, and no one knows when the nightmare will end.
We won't let this subject come off the agenda!!
We, all the residents of Israel, will unite together and do everything so that the soldiers will be returned to their homes quickly!

"These are 3 soldiers who went to defend the state!! To defend us!!

"On 14.5.07, Monday, we will all be in black shirts, and we call on you, Ehud Olmert – return the soldiers to their homes, and to their normal lives as they were before!!"

I didn't pay too much attention at first, primarily because I tend to ignore mass emails, hysterical notices and the seemingly endless protests that Israelis love to hold. I did, however, point out to the friend who sent me the email, which she received from someone at her large Jerusalem company, that the three soldiers were not all kidnapped in July, as the notice said they were. Regev and Goldwasser were abducted by Hezbollah on the Lebanese border on July 12, setting off the Second Lebanon War, but Shalit was kidnapped by Palestinian militants near the Gaza border on June 25. I attributed this distortion to an oversight on the part of an overzealous protest organizer with a possible addiction to hand-lettered signs and megaphones.

But then came a twist that made the message much more interesting, by seeming to add a cleverly manipulative spin to the exhortation to wear black. A second email went around stating that the original message was actually one big hoax perpetrated by Israeli Arabs with the intention of tricking Israeli Jews into unwittingly identifying publicly with Naqba Day – the anniversary of the secular date of the establishment of the State of Israel, which is commemorated by Palestinians and other Arabs as a day of catastrophe ("naqba" in Arabic).

"The State of Israel was established on [the Hebrew date of] 5 Iyar 5708," reads the second email. "It was a difficult and traumatic event for Israeli Arabs. Every year they commemorate a day that's called Nakba. This day is commemorated on the secular date on which the state was established: 14.5.1948. Therefore, Israeli Arabs will be very 'happy' to see us wearing black on their holiday."

According to this theory, such patriotic exclamations as "These are 3 soldiers who went to defend the state!! To defend us!!" were merely a way of cynically playing on widespread Israeli feelings.

The email also said the official Web site for the abductees - which lists a calendar of events held to show solidarity with the missing soldiers and their families - mentioned nothing about the protest, and noted a couple of linguistic mistakes in the original notice that it said indicated that the writer's mother tongue was spoken Arabic rather than Hebrew.

I was left a bit puzzled, though, as to why there was a date discrepancy in the hoax theory too: Naqba Day is generally commemorated on May 15, not the 14th, even though the State of Israel was officially established on May 14, 1948. Israel, for its part, celebrates its Independence Day in accordance with the Hebrew calendar, and pays no attention to the secular date.

Lo Relevanti, an Israeli Web site that aggregates mass emails and gives the opinion of site author Hanan Cohen as to whether it's worth passing them on, appears to set everything straight.

It turns out, according to Cohen, that there was no hoax at all - only a lack of awareness of the possible confusion with Naqba Day and a lack of coordination with the abductees' families, who put out a statement saying they don't want a protest involving black shirts because of the association with death. The problem with the original protest notice was further compounded by the absence of a name or contact information, spurring apparently unfounded suspicions.

The claim that the protest was a hoax, writes Cohen, is "a great example of a mistake upon a mistake upon a mistake." According to his version of events, the initiators of the May 14 protest only made matters worse when they got wind of the email arguing that it was a Naqba Day hoax: They moved the protest to May 15, which really is Naqba Day.

But the problems have since been fixed. In response to the wishes of the families of the abductees, the protest organizer, who has since identified himself, is now calling on all Israelis to unite next Monday, May 21, by wearing white - "which symbolizes, most of all, hope," according to the revised text.

This time, the event has been coordinated with the non-profit association that runs the official Web site, and now appears on the site's activities list. In addition, the protest notice has been posted on a separate Web site set up for the purpose, which now notes the organizer's name - Ilan Spector - and his contact details. Spector has also fixed the linguistic errors that had previously cast aspersions on his intentions. The text does, however, still say that all three Israelis were abducted in July.

So what I have learned from all this? To ignore mass emails, hysterical notices and the seemingly endless protests that Israelis love to hold.

Neither here nor there

2007-05-06T18:13:00.000+03:00

You know those annoying people on radio and television who insist on talking into the mike just to let you know that absolutely nothing is happening, but that - don't worry - something will be happening very shortly?

Well, as I was in a cab last week passing the Foreign Ministry on my way to work, the correspondent for the radio station my cab driver was listening to was describing the scene inside the Foreign Ministry, where Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was about to give a press conference on her response to the Winograd report on the Second Lebanon War.

Instead of waiting for the press conference to actually begin before broadcasting it, the radio station aired the incredibly inane patter of said correspondent, who was left to breathlessly report rumors of how Livni may or may not have greeted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when she met with him before the press conference.

The breaking news sounded more like 11-year-old girls desperately trying to squeeze some excitement out of an utterly yawn-worthy he said-she said conversation they had overheard.

"She said, 'It's good to see you,' or something like that," the correspondent related, to the best of my recollection. "And he said, 'Well, I’m tired.'"

And then came the speculation - because God forbid we should wait two minutes to actually hear what Livni has to say, when it's so much more informative to just guess.

The announcer predicted that, despite all the Israeli and international reporters impatiently waiting to hear Livni speak, the press conference was likely to be rather "pareve," since she wasn't expected to quit the government.

Pareve is a concept borrowed from kashrut laws, in which food is designated meat, dairy or neither - that is, pareve. Meat and dairy don't mix, but pareve food - like fish, eggs and pasta - can be eaten with either steak or cheese, giving rise to the idea that "pareve" is a rough equivalent to either "wishy-washy” or "bland" because it doesn't take a stance; it's neither here nor there.

But Mr. Radio was not quite satisfied with his careful assessment of what the foreign minister had not yet said, and quickly upped his designation to "pareve plus" (פרווה פלוס) - because after all, he noted, Livni did call the press conference, so she must be gearing up to say something.

The correspondent gave no indication, however, of whether he thought Livni's comments would be more likely to go with steak or with cheese.

Thanks for voting!

2007-05-01T00:59:00.000+03:00

According to the "preliminary uncertified" first round results for the Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards, this blog is a finalist in both categories in which it was entered. It got second place for Best New Blog, Group B, with 51 votes, and first place for Best Personal Blog, Group C, with 50 votes. (The top two in both groups become finalists.)

Thank you to all who voted for this blog! This is one of those cases where every vote really does count. Keep coming back and don't be too shy to leave a comment. (I appreciate them even if I don't necessarily respond.)