Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Defying President Bush, the Democratic-led Senate turned back a Republican attempt to remove a call for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq from a $124 billion war-spending bill, Tuseday… The $124 billion appropriation comes on top of $70 billion already approved for this year and would drive the price tag for the now-unpopular war past the half-trillion-dollar mark. The Pentagon says it would have to start diverting funds from other programs to Iraq unless it passes by mid-April. (My emphasis.)

The GDP of Israel is $114.3 billion.

New Zealand’s is $94.6 billion.

The GDP of Swaziland, the country with the highest per capita HIV infection rate (38.8%!), according to the CIA Factbook: $2.12 billion.

If you bought condoms out of a machine in a truck stop bathroom for $.75 apiece, this would be enough money to buy every single person in sub-Saharan Africa a condom to use each day of the year, and still easily have enough to buy yourself and your friends IHOP after dropping the rubbers off.

I’m not saying anything, except that if we as a nation are going to spend money like we’re printing it in the basement, we should spend it on AIDS prevention instead of trying to mitigate a civil war in some Arab pisspot.

But other than that, I’m not saying anything.

I know “Separated at Birth?” jokes perform stand-up on the deck of a 50-and-above singles cruise liner plying the lake of fire at the lowest level of Comedy Hell, in the brooding shadow of its capital Pundemonium, but when watching Star Wars tonight I couldn’t help but be jolted by the similarity between a certain Imperial governmental official and a certain Israeli governmental official. Observe these sallow princes of men:

Grand Moff Tarkin:

Ehud Olmert:

Uncanny, no? And “Tarkin” sounds like a Jewish name. Of course, the similarities extend only as far as physical appearance and probable ethno/religious heritage - when it comes to effective, decisive leadership, Grand Moff Tarkin is obviously the superior man. Grand Moff Tarkin promised to blow the shit out of Alderaan, and goddammit, Grand Moff Tarkin blew the shit out of Alderaan. Ehud Olmert promised to blow the shit out of Hizbullah, and goddammit, Ehud Olmert blew the legs off of a generation of Lebanese children.

The more you tighten your grip, Olmert, the more voters will slip through your fingers.

Somehow, probably because by his own telling he was raised in a Charedi box, my friend Meier has lived 21 years and never seen the Star Wars trilogy. So we’ve rented it, prepared not one, but two bags of popcorn, cleared the detritus off the butt-dents in the couch to prepare for an optimal slouching experience, and thrown on PJs, slippers and blankets - and now Meier is ready to discover for the very first time that that is not, in fact, a moon, it’s a space station, and that one should always let the Wookiee win.

Today, a lazy Sunday, I decided to buy some more underpants. I don’t quite have enough that they fall due to be washed with my other clothes, and I’m tired of the hat trick of no-clean underwear stopgaps (washing one pair in the sink, freeballing, or trying not to think about it). So after church, I went to the department store to buy some underwear. Doesn’t that sound easy?

Guess again, Doris. Buying underwear in New Zealand is surprisingly difficult. In the States, I would have proceed as follows:

1) Go to the store.
2) Buy a three-pack of dark solid or striped, small or medium boxer-briefs.
3) Go home and watch three hours of “Roseanne” eating Cheetos and wearing only my new underwear to break them in.

From driveway to couch in less than an hour! But no, because I’m in wacky Polynesia, things have to be different. I get to the store - “Farmers” - and go in to the men’s underwear section. This always makes me uncomfortable, because the men’s underwear packages all have Genetically Modified Cornfed Guy on them, with his preternaturally hairless, statistically desireable torso golden under a synthetic sun, and a grin of beatific, otherworldly happiness on his face - as though he’d just seen the woman he loves set down a tray of nachos in front of his so she has both hands free to make out with a Currently Lusted-After Starlet. Now, I have a pigeon chest, I burn badly if I stay in the sun for more than twenty minutes, and the closest I’ve ever gotten to the nacho/starlet situation is getting a blow job while I played “Super Mario Brothers 3.” I do not like to be reminded of these deficiencies when I buy anything, especially underwear. In addition to Underwear Guy, I’m also confronted with The Disturbing Underwear - the tight ones with a pronounced pouch in the front, that you might store your more virile parts within. I don’t really know any guy who likes to roll up his hose, tuck the huevos in with the ranchero, and place them securely in a prominent polyester nook - well, no guy who doesn’t work at a gay bar distributing Jell-O shots. . I think the idea is to make your junk more prominent: “Look upon my pepper, ye passers-by, and despair.” I always try to buy clothing that doesn’t call attention to my genitals, because… you know what? No! I shouldn’t have to explain why I don’t buy genital-attention-attracting clothing, because it should go without saying that I do. When it becomes necessary to consciously seek clothing that doesn’t say, “LOOK I’M NOT A GELDING SEE I HAVE STUFF ATTACHED TO MY CROTCH,” the world has taken a grievous misstep. Also, can you imagine how awful it would be to get an erection in those underpants? Talk about straining at one’s bonds.

So, grinning naked guys and banana-hammocks skirted, I started to look for realistic, staid underwear favored by sane people. Well, they don’t have any. What they have are miles and miles of white briefs. My oppositions to white briefs are as follows:

But white briefs are what are to be had in the NZ. So, to my annoyance, I start looking through the individual underpantses on the wall, which were between 20 and 30 dollars a pair. Now, I know these were small Kiwi dollars, not big well-fed American dollars, but still. $14 dollars for something that’s going to go on my butt, that probably one other person will see? I would not put a fine fur on my butt, (insert joke about there already being one,) because it’s my butt. I sit on it. It is an unglamorous but useful part, and should be clothed accordingly. So I picked out the three most reasonable pairs, and hid them under a pile of fat man jeans so I could go and check the ultra-discount store for nice WASPy underpants and return for these if The Warehouse failed me.

Did you know that in New Zealand, there’s an underpants brand called “Rio?” And that they sell bikini briefs in seven-packs and call it “A Week in Rio?” And did you know that I almost fucking bought them, because they were reasonably priced, and because they were actually the most reasonable underpants in the fucking store? A red g-string, covered with hearts, made out of some heat-trapping, non-breathable, super-flammable Nader-baiting fabric hung next to a display of boxer shorts with “edgy” slogans. You know the ones - little hot dogs and the phrase “How about a foot-long?” Leaving aside the arguments that a foot is unlikely and probably in excess of what is desireable, who thinks that’s funny? Has anyone ever laughed aloud at one of those forced single entendres? It’s one small, small step above ones that say “My penis is behind this thin layer of cotton!” The guys who buy these boxers will mate with the girls who have tattoos just above their “hoo-hahs” that read “Aren’t you lucky?” (yes, I’m sure the obstetrician feels himself indded among the elect), and the resulting children will be so literal that within three generations English will be reduced to a vulgar form of Newspeak, punctuated with humorless brays of “laughter” at stunning sallies of bedroom repartee like “I’m going to ejaculate!” Everything will sound like an awkwardly dubbed Korean porn video.

Reeling, I went to the hippie we-sew-our-own-underwear store. It was closed, which was a mercy because I couldn’t tell through the window which were the men’s and women’s underwear. Orange mid-size semi-briefs! IT’S SO AMBIGUOUS.

So I went back to Farmers and bought the overpriced underwear. It was too much to spend for buttcovers, but I didn’t have the strength to try any more.

*No, not really, dammit.

Chris: I wanted to post on why Calvinism is heresy, but I’m too lazy.

Hymie: You should do it. I’m dry lately.

Chris: You might blog the Phil Spector scandal. Jury selection is going on, and he changed Gay Icon Hairstyles from Dolly Parton to Ellen.

Hymie: It’s the Wall of… MURDER!

Chris: Da doo bang bang bang, da doo bang bang…

Hymie: He shot me and it felt like a kiss.

Chris: Yeah, my heart stood still / Yes, his name was Phil / Yeah, and when he shot me dead / Da doo bang bang bang, da doo bang bang….

Oh, Phil. You let me down. “Be My Baby!” “Da Doo Ron Ron!” My secretly, guiltily beloved “Pretty little Angel Eyes!” And then you did something so nightmarish, so evil, so unrepentantly wicked that I honestly cannot believe that the man responsible for the Crystals and the Ronettes could stoop to such depravity.

And then you killed a woman!

Am I attracted chiefly to brunettes with almond eyes and great eyelashes because they look like my mother, or because they look like me? And which is more disturbing, latent Oedipal tendencies or unrestrained narcissism?

One of the many, many facets of Mikeleh’s and my increasing folie a deux is our horror of bodily functions and any discussion of them. (There is one exception to this rule, but the last time we tried to explain we sounded even more deranged than usual.) By and large, any discussion of… effluent, shall we say, mortifies us both. We can discuss, freely, horribly depraved sexual practices. We both think war crimes can, in a certain light, be hilarious. (If they want a homeland that bad, no one lives on Bikini Atoll anymore, and - look, I’m not suggesting anything.) But bring up something you brought up, and it renders us helpless. If it has been digested, even in part, it is our Kryptonite. We discovered this mutual Achilles’ gag reflex during our first weeks at Tulane, when we first came to discover that we shared a floor with The Edgeshitter, a young man who, for some reason I now hope never to discover, could not… fully… obtain the angle of descent most convenient for subsequent… oh, hell. He shat on the rim of the toilet bowl, somehow. CONSTANTLY. This didn’t happen twice, this happened twice a week at the very least. I have no idea why, or how. Theories included ingestion of rocket fuel, a vacation in India, an anus misplaced by a capricious or vengeful God, or a bizarre reign of terror. No one liked the situation, but Mikeleh and I were almost in tears. We probably would have killed him and his parents, but we never learned for sure who it was.

Considering my near-hysterical hatred of all things excreted, try to imagine my horror to find it used in New Zealand as an advertising (note the “s”) gimmick. Yesterday, I was in a hostel in Franz Josef, a town named after the glacier named after the emperor. It is beautiful and you should go. Anyway, in the hostel, I went to the can to, uh, let the sin out, and I saw a poster on the wall that, in the pseudo-science recently favored by advertisers, discussed the effects of a certain X-TREeEeEM ride’s effect on the bowels. New Zealand was divided into concentric “zones,” with the epicenter at Queenstown, and these zones were number as to - I can barely type this - how many pairs of underpants should be worn in each zone to minimize… well, to minimize. The various levels of protective gear required for each zone were demonstrated on a teddy bear to the right of the map. Level 5 - Red Alert - Attack Imminent - Queenstown Bear had on five pairs of underpants, goggles, a gas mask, a helmet, and was encased in an immune-system-sparing bubble. On the wall next to this poster was a sticker someone had later placed there that said “WARNING - LEVEL FOUR” and, of course, and enormous brown splotch.

Who does this work on? Who is on the fence, thinking “I know Queenstown is pretty, but it’s so touristy, and I wanted to get to Dunedin before… wait, they have something that will make me shit myself? WE HAVE TO GO.” Who even thinks, “Ah! Fecal marketing. Capital, capital. We’ll stop by that little village.” If I went up to someone and said, “Hey, would you like to go out? We can roll around in our own excrement!” almost no one would say, “Yeah, all right. Dinner and a movie and then an encore by dinner sounds great.” What part of “feces rocketing by with such force that protective headgear is considered indispensable by most prudent plush toys” makes anyone, no matter how drunk, think “Queentown or bust!”

And then. And then. I’m sitting here in an intenet cafe in Christchurch, terrified by the thought of going out into the street in a strange city in a foreign country on a Drinking Holiday and going back to the hostel room I share with ELEVEN other people (I don’t even like eleven whole people!) and I have to, uh, powder my nose. I go into the can, and there is a sign that says:

WARNING

THE RESTROOM WILL BE CHECKED AFTER EACH USE AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANYMISBEHAVIORS WILL BE ASKED. PLEASE THINK CAREFULLY.

What? What? A little Korean person (everyone who has ever owned an internet cafe is Korean. If they aren’t when they buy it, they soon become so) is going to check the bathroom after I leave? For what? To see if I bought curry when I should have cooked something at home and scold me for poor spending habits? To check what amount of toilet paper is left and, if need be, chide me about the Amazon? To - God forbid - see if I was overcome by my passions after going to Anna Kournikova’s website and accidentally stumbling into her “just for friends!” gallery? And if they find evidence of these or other sins, will they announce it to the room or simply pillory me in front of the cathedral with a sign saying “DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS DAIRY?” And, to top it all off, to plunk the urinal cake into the bathroom of horrors New Zealand is apparently becoming, the sign had a clip-art of a “kawaii” girl sitting on the can, bareassed, with the “my-eyes-are-slits-my-mouth-is-open-real-big-and-there-are-indeterminate-drops-of-sweat-or-tears-by-my-face-so-you-can-tell-I’m-in-distress” Japanime expression on her face.

I would vomit, but this would only compund the problem.

So, does everyone remember how I moved to a foreign country kind of on a whim? And got a work visa through the one (1) agency that can get work visas for Americans to New Zealand, and they promised they’d help me get a job - in fact, required me to pay them to get me a job offer?

Well, if you don’t remember any of that, it happened.

So, while in Israel with Mikeleh, they sent me a newsletter about COOL JOBS IN NEW ZEALAND!!!1! One of these jobs was working in a grocery store in a town called Franz Josef, which is the tourist town that services the glacier of the same name. (In Maori, it’s called “Tears of the Avalance Girl.” People here are always saying things like “the Maori name of this fish is Keuha. That means ‘Daughter of the Laughing God who Bore Her Husband Fine Warrior Sons.’ No, it doesn’t. Maori needs seven words to say ‘SMOKING KILLS,’ and you want me to believe that they can compress an entire geneology into three short syllables?)

Anyway, I really wanted this job because I’ve studied a lot of Austro-Hungarian history, because I have a fetishistic love of supermarkets (so much food! such orderly rows!), and because of the phrase “Population 900.” A town so small, and so far from other towns, that 4,000-person-strong Hokatika is “town” and Greymouth’s 19,000 souls make it nigh unto a metropolis. I could finally achieve my dream of having my blood alcohol level achieve the population density of a jurisdiction I lived in! So what if the jurisdiction is “Diocese of Christchurch” or “Westland Fire Brigade,” I’ve still won! So, salivating at the probpect of the Habsburg - stacks of canned goods - misanthropy hat trick, I emailed the people back and asked how to get the job.

At least four times.

Bupkes.

So I thinks, “well, I’ll go to New Zealand, and then they’ll help me.” So I go to New Zealand, I meet the “Job Lady,” I am startled by her back hair (I don’t care how blonde it is, do something about it, you’re otherwise a pretty girl but on the borderline of turning into a golden tamarind) and she says I should send her a resume. So I do.

…

“I think I put my phone number down wrong on that resume I sent you; would you please check it?”

…

“So, uh, any jobs?”

…

Three weeks go by, I find my own job washing dishes at a “Mexican” “cantina” in Wellington, freak out that it doesn’t pay enough to live on (it didn’t), sleep with a co-worker, and run to the South Island because I don’t think I’m going to get to see any of the country because I will run out of money and have to go back and live with Dad and Anne Boleyn. Meanwhile, I start getting emails from Martijn-with-a-j about “SUMMER JOBS IN THE USA!!!!”

I’ve had a summer job in the USA. It was boring. I lived with my father and his common-law wife that has anger management problems.

I write him back and ask about jobs in New Zealand. This bitch then has the gall to write me back and tell me that they “only arrange overseas jobs for New Zealanders, but if I make any friends who want to go to the USA or Canada, to refer them.”

So I wrote back saying essentially “Fuck you, Martijn, and your little Dutch spelling quirks, too,” my email gets forwarded all over, I get “concerned” replies from the broads in the office, and then Golden Tamarind emails me back, says it’s my fault for not emailing her my resume as an attachment (which I did), and gives me a list of jobs washing dishes that I can apply for.

Well, I know how to get a dishwashing job. I got one. They loved me, they just didn’t pay me enough to pay rent and eat both and, silly little thing that I am, I didn’t want to try to live on native ferns I grazed on at the park.

So, uh… does anyone have a job opening in Wellington?

Bueller?

I have a bank account. I’m not entirely sure why - I’m lucky if I have enough spare cash for a daily meal, which renders the concept of a decentralized system for the storing of money somewhat irrelevant - but I do. Not only do I have a bank account, I have a bank account at the absolute worst bank in Israel (a distinction roughly analogous to being the most enthusiastically human flesh-consuming dictator in sub-Saharan Africa), a bank whose conception of customer service and fiscal responsibility is summed up by its name alone: Discount Bank.

I actually have my own name for it. I’ll give you a hint: the word “Discount” has three vowels, and I take one out.

I have an account at Discount Bank because when I first arrived in Israel, I didn’t have any friends who knew well enough to inform me that opening an account there is the same as setting fire to your money, except of course when set fire to your money the lighter doesn’t demand you sign in triplicate and provide ID each time you strike the flint. So I blithely opened an account, and the money began to trickle out before the sullen clerk was even done demanding to know why I have a Russian middle name.

The banking system in Israel bears some explaining for my foreign audience. In most of the civilized world, according to my admittedly limited understanding of all things even vaguely related to money, the bank/customer relationship goes roughly like so:

Customer: Hi, I’d like to keep my money here.
Bank: Alright. We’ll hold onto your money and make it easily accessible, reserving the right to use it as capital for our company’s investments. In case we make a bad investment, the federal government will ensure that you, personally, suffer no financial loss. In return for your patronage, we’ll pay you a small monthly allowance based on the amount of money present in your account. What color cooler do you want?
Customer: Blue.

In Israel, of course, things are different.

Customer: Shalom, I’d like to withdraw some money from my account.
Bank: We’re sorry, the money in your account is not available at the moment.
Customer: Why the fuck not?!
Bank: It’s currently tied up in some investments. If you’ll look over the forms, which you signed in triplicate, you’ll see you’ve authorized the bank to do this.
Customer: What fucking investments?
Bank: Your capital was requisitioned because Mr. Nzeogwu in Lagos just sent us an e-mail saying he only needs another $2500 before his bank will release the $500 million fortune of a Texan oil baron who was tragically killed by Masai warriors while on safari. Once Mr. Nzeogwu’s money is released, your money will be returned to your account. Minus the standard 300 shekel investment fee, of course.
Customer: I’m going to kill someone.
Bank: Sorry, that service is not available at this branch. You’ll have to go to the branch at which you opened your account.

You see, the rent is due tomorrow, and thus I found myself at the downtown Discount Bank today with a comfortingly thick wad of shekels in hand, struggling to resist the powerful urge to run away with it to Laos where I could use it to rule as a god. Naturally, because it’s Discount Bank, there were only two open service windows and a line of fat old women, fat old religious women, and freichot (Discount’s target demographic) snaking back to the door. Naturally, because it’s Israel, I only use the word “line” because there’s no simple, elegant, monosyllabic English word for “disorganized mob of people pushing, complaining, talking on cell phones and playing Israel’s national sport, known simply as ‘I’m-behind-you-so-guard-my-place-in-line-while-I-go-grab-a-hafukh-and-a-Panai-Plus’.” (I have my own corollary game I start playing when Israelis pull this shit, which I call ‘When-you-come-back-and-demand-to-cut-in-front-of-the-person-now-behind-me, I’ll-pretend-I’ve-never-seen-you-before-in-my-life.” It’s fun to play!)

The only thing worse than waiting in a 45-minute line for a simple cash deposit, watching the bank’s tellers lard up on rugelach and gossip as the peasants grow restive in front of the glass windows, is when somebody in the line, always a woman of a certain age, decides that the most effective way to get everything moving smoothly is shouting complaints about the poor service and loudly lamenting how much of a hurry she’s in: “MAH KOREH PO?! ZEH LO BESEDER! ANI MEMAHERET!! SHERUT AL HA-PANIM BA-BANK HA-ZEH! EIZEH BALAGAN!” This makes the clerks even less inclined to get to work, and it makes me fucking furious. I become overcome by a powerful urge to wheel around and hiss, “If you don’t shut the fuck up, lady, I will memaher all over YOUR panim. Not because I want to, but because I have to. And what the fuck are you in such a hurry for? Are the fucking bourekasim getting cold, you withered bitch?”

Of course, I don’t actually hiss that. Because I’m a gentleman.

But I finally arrived to the teller, a religious woman wearing one of those ridiculous hats religious women have somehow convinced themselves don’t make them look like Jackie O. immediately after eating Aristotle, who, in a dazzling display of confidence in the customer, slowly and deliberately counted my money three times after I told her how much there was - and then made a show of how much of a favor she was doing me by allowing me to deposit a large amount of money at a branch of Discount that was not the one at which I opened my account.

I think the entire Discount experience can be most effectively encapsulated by mentioning what’s been playing on the TV monitors for people waiting in line every single time I’ve been at the bank for the past six months: extreme sports blooper reels. Normally watching a stunt biker toppling off his Kawasaki and shattering his tailbone would make you wince, but after 45 minutes in Discount world, the only thing you’ll be feeling is jealousy.

Why am I listening to new jack swing? And why can’t I stop?

The sickness is spreading to my brain.

Sigh.

We are still the feeble husks of men, as we have still not attracted the ire of the Great Firewall of China.

Boxer Rebellion. For a good time, call Empress Cixi. Unequal treaties. The Spratly Islands do not belong to China, not that that has ever stopped them. Peking duck. Man-o-Manchuoko. Dynasty Warriors 5 is an accurate portrayal of contemporary Chinese society. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms sucks. I wish India had won the Sino-Indian War. I have a Puerto Rican friend who married a Bulgarian who works at a Chinese restaurant. It is gross and awful to eat dogs - look at their little faces! When Castro dies, Mikeleh (A JEW) and I (A ROMAN CATHOLIC) are going to have a party WHERE WE DRINK ALCOHOL and talk about how much we HATE COMMUNISM. I was in a play in high school wherein I portrayed an embittered Asian lesbian. The Falun Gong people all seem very nice. Restore the Dalai Lama to Lhasa and kick the Chinese out of Tibet, out of the Uighur lands, out of Inner Mongolia, and any other land that someone else wants. STOP RUNNING BULLDOZERS OVER YOUR OWN CITIZENS. Karl Marx had a pronounced lisp and liked to wear little lacey things while proclaiming that he is “the prettiest of all the princesses in the realm.” Flied lice.

Hysterical anti-Communist ranting will continue until the situation improves!

Remember how every teacher you had would impart that tidbit? Not “Native American languages are on of the few examples of polysynthetic syntax in the world, along with some native Australian languages.” Not “Let’s consider what it would have been like to live in a society with different ideas about the nature of property than our own.” Not even “Native Americans have longer penises that any other ethnic group.” (This last is apparently true.) No, just “Indians called corn maize!” Hooray! One word, in one of many, many languages, has survived! A culture has been saved!

This is a feeble introduction to a post I probably ought to apologize for.

Anna Nicole Smith continues her Fruma Sarah-like odyssey to stir up shit from beyond the Styx.

AN INDIAN LOVE CHILD?! FUCK YES! I cannot express how giddy I am about this. Seriously, “as a historian,” this shit is awesome and trumps all those feeble Tudor succession crises. Everything that happens in this story - ev-a-ry-thing - has just added to my perverse delight. She flees to the Bahamas to whelp! Her son dies, mysteriously, of a fatal combination of methadone, ennui, and having more money than sense! Then she abruptly dies, of natural causes that are variously held to be methadone, pneumonia, Femi-Slim (or whatever) overdose, alligator attack, or some combination thereof! Her infant daughter inherits the moon! Her infant daughter has four potential fathers - including Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband, who judging by the last name may be distantly related to Catherine the Great! Her corpse is the center of a legal battle!

And now. Oh, and now. She has, according to the Red Man’s Jared Leto who claims to be the father, a half-Indian love child - the fruit of an illicit and race-hysterical affair. I CAN BARELY STAND IT. I feel like I should talk about the taboo against intercourse between a non-white man and a white woman. I ought to make some intelligent comment about media saturation in modern culture. I should at least make a tit joke.

But… she referred to herself as his “squaw!” Squaw! That’s probably not even a word! She referred to his penis as “big wampum!” That doesn’t even come close to making sense - I’ve certainly never, during the Act of
Love, advised anyone to do anything to my “token of an intermediate economical stage between barter and a cash-based system.” When he hid with the child at the reservation, she called him an Indian giver! Yes, she fucking did! Even her alleged papoose-daddy gets in on the act, referring to Smith’s hunger to be hunted and gathered by someone who knows how as “scarlet fever.” Can you even believe it?

Here’s the original Phoenix New Times article, if you can stand it. I… I have to lie down.

I’m ill. I don’t mean sniffles ill, I mean fluid-pouring-out-of-most-available-orifices-from-nose-to-horribly-infected-toe ill. Hurts-to-keep-eyes-open ill. Only-thing-preventing-me-from-suicide-is-Playstation-and-an-as-yet-unwatched-season-of-Scrubs ill.

I also just realized that I have not spoken a single word to anyone, including myself, today. I find this oddly reassuring, but I won’t let it distract me from what I intended to ask by writing this post: why why oh fucking why do they not have NyQuil in this miserable sandbox?

Self-medication is a miserable exercise in futility in Israel. The drugs available to consumers without a prescription are as follows:

a) 12 different yet absolutely identical pain relievers/fever reducers ending with “-mol.”
b) Nasal spray so powerful that if you use it for more than three days, your sinuses will melt like a Nazi opening the Ark of the Covenant.
c) Brightly-colored children’s version of above.
d) Ibuprofen (thank God).
e) Flavored lozenges - the glories of capitalism mean that the consumer now has the choice of lemon or cherry.

That’s about it. Anything else, you need a prescription for, or they keep it locked up behind the counter and you have to actually ask the pharmacist for it. That’s right, if let’s say you’ve made a dietary error and your stomach is in open revolt, you can’t discreetly purchase an on-the-shelf bottle of Pepto-Bismol, you have to request the ineffective Israeli tablet-form equivalent (Kalbeten, in case you needed to know) from a pharmacist who is either a barely Hebrew-speaking recent Russian immigrant named “Ludmilla” (Ludmilla was probably chief of radiology back in the Old Country) or a doddering, hard-of-hearing old man given the job by social services - either way, you’ll have to repeat what you need clearly, slowly and loudly enough that everyone jostling you in the line behind you will know exactly why it is you’re pale as a latex glove and doing the bathroom dance.

So the upshot is, when you’re desperately ill and all you want is the sweet release of the drug-induced, mildly hallucinatory sleep that only NyQuil can provide, you’re shit out of luck. Because they don’t have NyQuil here, unless Ludmilla is hoarding it behind the counter for when the sheer indignity of it all just demands a cathartic DXM trip. They don’t have anything effective here, except for that uranium-powered nasal spray. So the only recourse is to improvise, given the limited materials at hand, something that approximates the effect of everyone’s favorite gag-inducing green syrup. Thus, take:

a) Ibuprofen
b) Chernobyl nasal spray
c) Lemon-flavored throat lozenges
e) Liquor

Mix together, and hope you don’t pull a Hendrix during the night, however sweet a release that may seem.

And now for the song of the evening, a selection made ever so appropriate by, yes, lyrics that perfectly describe what I’m feeling right now in my life: “Why why why why why why why? Why why why why why why why why why why?”

Scientist - Gunman

I’m on the evening’s third bottle of Sol - partly because there was a big sale on six-packs at the Russian grocery down the street which, like all Russian groceries in Israel and around the world, reeks of jam-filled pastries, pork and quiet desperation, partly because the three sun-kissed syllables of “cerveza!” (it demands an exclamation point) create a much more exciting word for carbonated hops beverages than “beer,” a monosyllabic grunt easily combined with “WHOOOOOOOO!” by people who don’t deserve to drink it - and three beers is exactly enough excess liquid to burst the dams and allow the reservoir of bitchiness to spill forth and drown some peasants.

The part of the peasants tonight will be played by my perennial whipping boys, Anglo Jews in Jerusalem, a group who inspires such crippling self-hatred and revulsion that had Philip Roth been born 6000 miles to the East, he would have ended it all a solid decade before Portnoy had the chance to file his first complaint. You may object that I tar Anglos with too broad a brush, subdivided as they are into dozens of camps - American, British, Australian, South African, New Zealander, Canadian, modern Orthodox, classical Orthodox, neo-Chasidic, paleo-Chasidic, yeshiva student, seminary student, Hebrew U Student, Gush Etzion yeshiva student, Pardes student, Nachla’ot resident, German Colony Resident, Bak’a resident, Katamon resident, execrable Cafe Rimon patron, slime-covered Underground/Mike’s Place patron - but I assure you, I’ve considered it very carefully, and I hate them all with absolute equality.

Actually, that’s not strictly true - throw a potent enough combo meal my way, let’s say a Canadian neo-Chasidic Nachla’ot resident who loves knocking back Illy mochaccinos at Cafe Rimon, and I can almost guarantee that I’ve had a wet dream about their untimely death. Hell, it probably wasn’t even a dream, just a straight-out wet.

But I digress. While a complete list of the things that make Jerusalemite Anglos awful would be far too much material for Kosher Eucharist to cover - hello, blog spin-off idea - I can at least focus on a few choice transgressions. Chiefest among them in my mind of late is the tendency of Anglos - particularly Anglos who speak little-to-no Hebrew (i.e. most of them) - to pepper their English with random Hebrew words.

This is similar to the oft-glimpsed phenomenon of a newly-religious young Jew attempting to fit in with his new crowd by running his sentences through a Yiddish meat grinder until he sounds like an ethnic caricature too broad for the Borscht Belt to squeeze around, but trust me, it’s even more annoying. Several words pop up with alarming frequency, and often equally alarming inaccuracy, in the pidgin vocabularies of these kippa-clad amateur Hebraists: mamish (a corruption of mamash, “really”), davka (”ironically,” “of all [noun]…”), tachles (”totally,” “I’ll level wichu”) and a host of other verbal offenses which the Sol has snatched clean from my memory. Even worse is a certain tendency, common among, but in no way particular to, mainline East Coast yeshivish dosim (I’m sorry for throwing in a Hebrew word there, but there is no equivalent English word that can be spat out with the same lip-curling contempt): insisting on using the Hebrew name of cities with a long-established English name. You have not known suffering until you’ve heard yet another denim-beskirted child of Orthodox privilege curl her nasal East Coast inflection around “Yerushalayim,” which invariably comes out so far from the appropriate Hebrew pronunciation you wonder why she bothered in the first place.

Helpful hint: it won’t make you less Jewish if you say “Jerusalem” - it will, however, make you less annoying.

What I’m trying to say is, there’s no reason for a native speaker of English - in fact, someone who speaks ONLY English - to churn out an ear-piercing nugget of Creole like “Sometimes I don’t know why I chose to live davka in Yerushalayim; but tachles, it’s probably because there are mamish fly biddies hanging out at Katzefet on the midrachov every night.” It doesn’t need to be so complicated and so multi-lingual; there’s a much more elegant, and entirely monolingual, way to say exactly the same thing: “I am such a fucking tool.”

Lesbian Says:
March 8th, 2007 at 2:26
lesbian sex

I like this one even better than when “Hebrew National” threatened to stone us.