blogging

Winter Romance

Rain patters down on the plastic roof outside the window. The breeze comes through the slats, fresh and delicious, bearing with it a smell of clean, sweet moisture. The sounds of the street are slightly muted, everything growing hushed in the soft rain. Even buses, with their monstrous thundering and their creaking halts, sound soft and polite as the drops come down lightly from the wispy gray clouds.

As the drizzle grows into a rain, the light seems brighter, more cheery. The small comforts of home – the sweatshirt flung on the back of the chair, the cat curled up in a ball on the couch – become more cozy and endearing by far. Even as the rain turns into a respectable downpour, the home becomes the perfect nest, wonderfully familiar, all of it softer around the edges somehow.

If only the rain could go on all night, it would accompany the soft light of the reading lamp and the soft rustle of pages as they are lovingly turned in their spine. A rain of this sort can only herald the sweetest and most comfortable of sleeps. If only it would go on all night.

But alas, all good things come to an end, and quickly, all too quickly, the autumn rain disappears, leaving behind it a comforting memory, a slight shiver of joy and a disappointed girl, who wanted to stay up all night reading with the rain.

Ho Hum Pen

‘Ho hum, ho hum,’
Went the little pen.
‘What shall I write for my mistress today?’
Went the little pen.

‘Shall I write a romantic ballad,
To break the hearts of all?
Or maybe a clever haiku,
That speaks of spring and fall?
Then again, mayhap an epic poem,
Of battle and love and loss,
And a little princess who waits in a tower,
With nothing to do but floss.

Perhaps a novel with chapters aplenty,
Should be my next project today!
Or instead, a political satire of those
Who promise, but then go out and play.’

So the pen mused for hours on end,
And could not make up his mind,
For he knew he would KNOW it
Whenever at last the perfect idea he’d find.

But just like every other day,
The pen gave up so soon,
Because a hand was now upon him,
And a voice too, begging a boon.
‘Oh write with me, please,
My dearest of pens.
We’ll create and muse,
And let us be friends!’

So just like every day,
The poor pen – he gave in,
And in the hand of his mistress,
He wrote, and he grinned.

Can you say ‘lack of structure’? I know it doesn’t flow all that well, but it’s late, and I’m tired, and darn it, I wanted to write a poem about a pen!

Castles in the Sky

Only lately have I actually realized what dream is forming slowly but surely in my mind. It didn’t start out as something I was aware of, but rather just an idea that floated around the empty grey spaces at the back of my mind – you know, the place where your chores usually go and from which you fish out weird random facts once in a while, like “Curiosity killed the cat” isn’t the full proverb, it’s “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.”

The thing that I realized is this: I have had this blog for a month and a half now, perhaps even a bit more. The days I haven’t written have been very few, and then it was because I wasn’t at home and had no way to write that day. More and more, writing is becoming part of my daily routine. I might not write all that well, I might not be particularly interesting, but writing is becoming more and more a part of my life.

The dreams that this fact arouses send me into a quiet frenzy, the likes of which I haven’t had in a long time. I still love the idea of acting and I still love the idea of singing. I still love the thousand-and-one professions I wish I could shove into a lifetime. But slowly, the thought of being able to actually write for a living one day – even if it is twenty years in the future – makes me feel as if my stomach is about to explode in a burst of confetti and joy.

Bomb Country

Sirens pierce the air with their harsh sounds, sounding their half-melodic noise in the distance. First siren. Second, third. Mostly we ignore sirens, we just hear them and think, maybe for a split second, that something happened somewhere. Then we forget about it and get on with our lives. So it is most places, I believe. Sirens are so much a part of the background that we really don’t notice them much.

In Israel, it is often different. Sure, we ignore the first sound of those wailing tones. But when another and another join the first’s voice, we start to wonder. What has happened? Was there a bomb? Was there an attack somewhere? How many are dead this time? What political tangles will imerge now and how will the papers make it racist this time?

The Intifada has been over for quite a few years now, but still, we cannot forget the times when we would look at the front cover of the newspaper and count how many died last night and how many were wounded. All those deaths, for a squabble over some silly land. Israel, Holy Land indeed.

A Good Day’s Work

There is a certain feeling of satisfaction that we get after accomplishing things. For instance, if we get a good grade, a promotion, help someone with something important – when we do these things, we feel pleased, happy, content. I don’t know WHY we feel like that. It’s not as if our survival depends on such things. If anything, eating, drinking and breathing are things we get only minor satisfaction from.

Sometimes just knowing we got the smallest thing done makes us happy and satisfied. But seriously, why? Our basic instincts don’t call for us to strive towards anything. That’s what makes us human of course, or one of the things at least – the fact that we do strive, we have goals and wants that extend beyond our basic needs for survival. What a wonderous thing evolution was to bring us to this state.

Then again, when I look over at my cats and see them smiling just because they’re sleeping in a comfortable position, it makes me want to forget all goals and just become a creature of habit and instinct who doesn’t need to do anything more in life than eat, sleep and get scratched behind the ears.

Wizard Mathews [A Short Story That Isn’t Really About Magic]

The Great Wizard Mathews, sat down and wrapped his cloak around himself. He thought, for the hundredth time that day, that his experiment had gone horribly wrong. He shivered a bit and flinched away from the noisy road, burrowing himself further in his cloak, and closed his eyes.

The Great Wizard was an expert of his field and an important man, where he came from anyway. His expertise was crystal balls, the kind that look backwards and forwards and over the world. They were simple things, really, crystal balls. It was all just an easy matter of tweaking with the chemicals and dimensions that made up time and space and then confining the tweaked bits in glass orbs. All quite easy stuff really, as wizarding went.

Mathews sniffled and then sneezed. The smoke down in his little corner was even worse than it had been walking around all day. He was quite sure he saw some poisenous matter drifting from the strange little gate in the ground. He pressed his old, wrinkled and once-respectful face against the dirty stone and tried with all his might to disappear from the place. What a fool he had been! He was so angered with himself that he bit his hand and beat his head against the wall a few times.

The trouble with Mathews was, he got bored quickly. He had been in the crystal ball business for some fifty odd years, a short time indeed for a wizard, and he grew so bored with fiddling and confining things in orbs that he decided to fiddle with time and space a bit more, only this time outside of orbs, and see what would happen. His first experiments were exhilerating – Mathews passed through time and worlds quickly, colors and sounds flashing by him until his head fair spun with it and his body felt invigorated and new with the energy of it.

Today though – Had it really all just begun this morning? – Mathews had thrown himself into the process with so much gusto, that he had gotten stuck. Stuck in one place, a place so different from his own world that he wanted to weep at its ugliness. The worst thing was that his powers seemed to be drained. He had decided that an evil spell must be on this place. He knew it in his bones. He saw other abandonned or lost wizards like him around the noisy, dangerous and smelly place he was in, also bereft of their powers. He knew them as his brethren because of their wizened faces, their cloaks and capes of all manner, their weariness at this world and most of all, their constant mutterings – stuff he reckoned must be spells. Well, would be spells if they’d worked- it seemed all the others had lost their powers as well.

Mathews tried to speak to the others, but most were so deep in dispair at their lost powers that they didn’t answer him. Some spoke in code it seemed, muttering low, but Mathews did not understand their code and alas, knew not how to go about cracking it.

So it had gone all day, and Mathews was now tired. Bone weary, even. He glanced up and saw a child look at him, from far away. He sighed, tried to smile at the little boy, and then lay his head back against the wall and slept.

_______________________________________________

“Robbie, come here! Stop staring at that old vagrant!” A woman murmured urgently, tugging at her young son’s coat, as the boy tried to go over to the wizard.

“But Mommy, Mommy, he’s a wizard! I saw a crystal ball in his pocket! I want him to teach me magic,” the little Robbie screamed in protest. His mother pulled him away, still screaming, and tried to explain about homeless men and vagrants and promised to buy him some ice cream. When Robbie wouldn’t stop screaming about the wizard, his mother dispaired and bought him a glittery plastic magic wand from the toy-store.

Robbie was content then, and agreed to go home without a fuss. But when he was tucked into bed that night, he wondered about the wizard and knew, for one clear moment before he fell into the deep sleep of children, that he was the only one in this world who would ever know that that man was a Great Wizard.

A Hellish Night Indeed

Drenched in sweat, tears leaking down my face, I woke up repeatedly from the most horrid night’s sleep I’ve had in memory. Tossing and turning and throwing blankets off and pulling them back on again, I could not get any rest.

In the books, in my lovely, loved books, the heroes always sleep badly before a battle, before a grand decision, when there’s a monarch’s life on the line or at least a wedding or something else significant the next day. For me? None of these. Today is not a special day, is not supposed to be anything special or life-altering or even exciting. No offense to Monday, the 20th of October.

So why? I have no answer. I just know that of all the nightmarish nights that I’ve endured – and I’ve had my fair share, believe me – this was the worst. I dreamt of my boyfriend dying, I dreamt of every mundane chore and how I cried through it because of his death. When I woke up from the dream, it took my a full ten minutes of lying in bed and sobbing to realize that it was just a dream. Even after that, I spent the next four hours until my alarm was to ring waking time and again thinking I was late, thinking it was a different day, panicking that it was afternoon and I’d missed the bus I’m to take.

Small wonder then, that I feel like I’ve been up all night running.

Devil’s Yellow Shirt [A Short Story]

Despite some misgivings over it, and especially over its ending, I will post this story here and let the grand populace decide. Or the grand ten or so who actually care. I hope you enjoy!

Devil woke up one morning and lay in bed for a few minutes, savoring the feeling of his good mood. Eventually he got out of bed and decided to wear his yellow button-down shirt to work today. He was, after all, in a good mood, so why not celebrate it with some color?

Devil walked through the small corridor of his apartment and entered his equally small and narrow kitchen. He put some toast in the toaster and turned it on. Then he waited patiently for the toast to pop up, put the toast on a plate, buttered it at the table, and went on to munch it. When he was done, he carefully put his plate in the sink. He then went to wash his hands, face and neck, and to put on a pair of pants- something he had forgotten to do before.

Devil started every morning with this blissfully human routine. Then, every morning, he walked to the bus stop, and took the bus to work. Not many people in his office did the work as well or as joyfully as Devil did. Devil prided himself on his good work, as well as his line of work, one that he felt was particularly devilish. What Devil did was this: he looked at a lot of files of sick people, and figured out how to not get them the current financing they needed for their current malady, whatever that happened to be. Devil figured he was probably contributing to Hell a lot more now than he did when he was actually IN Hell. By not giving many people the financial help they needed, a good percentage of them would die due to the lack of help, and after all, there were many more people in Hell than in Heaven, so a good percentage of the dead people would end up in Hell.

Another thing Devil prided himself on, apart from being exceedingly good at his job, was his physical appearance. He did not have horns. Nor did he have a pointy tail or cloven hooves. He wasn’t even very red most of the time, except when he ate Indian food of course. Devil actually chose time and again to be squat, balding, round and clean cut. This gave him the overall appearance of being utterly harmless, something that amused Devil greatly all through the centuries.

Devil had ruled Hell ever since it had been created by the human mind. He hadn’t done very much in Hell after a while, because eventually there were so many people there, that he got to delegate most of his responsibilities to some of the ones who had been there long enough to know how everything worked. Today though, Devil had no idea what Hell looked like, because he hadn’t set foot in the place for some 300 years or so. He assumed that, were he to go back today, it would look very much like a shopping mall. A very large and particularly infuriating shopping mall.

The reason Devil left Hell all those years ago was the very simple fact of his name. A boy, no older than 10 or 11, had ended up in Hell, and Devil, while doing his routine check that everything was getting done, happened to have a chat with the boy. First he learned that the boy had killed his dog when he was 4, and that he had been sure that he would end up in Hell, which in face, was what made him end up in Hell. Then the boy had pointed out to Devil that if he spelled his name backwards it would be Lived. Of course Devil just patted the boy on the head and sent him off to play, but then he thought about it for a while. Then he thought about it a bit more and realized just how ironic that was. Because of course Devil had never lived. He had existed for what felt like forever, but he had never LIVED. Not like all the people who came to Hell had.

So Devil, who considered himself somewhat the adventurous type, decided to live. He went into the world for the first time, and created himself as Robert Livingston. Then he became James Livingston and then, for a while, Charlotte Livingston. Then he decided he’d much rather stay male, and kept changing his name and whereabouts for centuries. That way, he never had to deal with the same people for too long, and he didn’t have the problem of needing to die at some point. About two hundred years ago he started a tradition, something to make his leaving and moving about a bit more interesting. On his last day in a place, he would tell the person he most got along with in that place that he was Devil really. He enjoyed the different responses people gave him and how they changed over time. He got a lot of Perhaps-You-Should-Talk-To-The-Preacher-About-This responses, and a lot of Oh-Lord-What-Do-You-Mean-By-That responses. Mostly though, he got Ha-Ha-Then-Where-Are-Your-Horns responses.

This particular day, the yellow shirt day, was Devil’s last day in his current town. He felt sad about it, because he would have to move far away and change profession and name, because people were so easily traceable these days what with Google and all. Still, his good mood would not be ruined, and he would give himself a good last day.

He got to work, sat at his desk, and ruined people’s lives for a while. At 12:35 he decided to take his lunch break, and he asked his best friend in the office, Mort, to join him.

Devil and Mort got along splendidly ever since they realized that they both didn’t feel any guilt over what they were being paid to do. Devil had decided more than five years ago that Mort would be the one he would tell the truth to on the day of his departure. He knew that perhaps he should stop his silly game, most especially because of the rash promise he made to himself about a hundred years back. But Devil was addicted by now, he just HAD to see people’s reactions and then never see them again.

So Devil took Mort down to the cafeteria, and they both got strong coffees and big salads and even bigger bags of potato-chips. They sat down at a table and talked for a while about the weather, about politicians and about the crime rates. Once they’d both polished off their meals and burped and groaned for a while, Devil decided it was time.

‘Mort, buddy,’ Devil began. ‘Today’s my last day on the job.’

‘What? Why, what happened, Ned?’ Mort replied, taken off guard. He very much liked Devil, or Ned, and didn’t want to be the only guilt-free one in the office again.

‘My mother, she lives in Paris and she’s sick as a dog. I’ve got to go take care of her. Haven’t got a choice. My poor mother did everything for me,’ Devil spun his little stories completely at random each time he left. He enjoyed seeing what his human imagination would crop up with each time.

‘Ah, buddy, I’m sorry to hear that. Any idea when you’ll be back?’

‘Not a clue, old pal, not a clue. I can tell you one thing though,’ Devil paused and waited for Mort to say ‘What?’ which he obligingly did. ‘I can tell you something real weird. I’m Devil, Mort. No joke, old buddy, I’m really THE Devil. The one who supposedly tortures the damned and all that.’

Mort stared, and then he chortled, and then he said ‘Ha! If you’re the Devil, where are your horns, huh?’ and then he chortled some more.

Devil thought to himself, Damn, and then he regretted his promise. Devil was a man of his word, and even if the promise had been to himself, he had to follow it through.

‘Aw, Mort, why’d you have to go and say that? See, I made a little promise to myself. You know those ads online, the ones that blink all these colors so you notice them. The ones that say something like “You’re the millionth person to see this ad! That means YOU win a prize! Click the banner for more details!”?’

‘Yeah,’ Mort wasn’t quite following what was going on.

‘You know how whenever you see that you know for sure that it’s a lie and that you’re not the millionth on that site and you’ll only get a virus if you click on the banner?’ Devil pressed on.

‘Uh, yeah, but buddy, what has this got to do with-‘

‘Well, see,’ Devil interrupted the wary Mort. ‘You really are the millionth person who’s asked me that stupid question about the horns. And you know I’m a man of my word, Mort. And I made myself a little promise that on the day I’d hear the millionth person ask me that question, I’d give him a little prize. And the prize would be, I’d go back to Hell and I’d stop making that person a consort and friend of the Devil. So there you go, Mort. It’s too bad, I enjoyed being here. Goodbye.’

Devil then seemed to drift out of his yellow shirt, as if he turned into mist, and then the yellow shirt and his pants were just draped over the chair, and his shoes and socks lay on the floor.

Mort stared at the chair with the clothes on it. Then he looked around. Nobody else in the cafeteria seemed to have noticed what went on. That is, no one noticed that a person – the Devil? – seemed to have disappeared out of his clothing. Mort stood up and looked around again. Nobody took any notice of him still. He walked calmly up to his cubical in the office, sat down and thought for a moment.

He wondered what was better, the Devil being IN Hell or OUT of it. He decided that for him at least, it was good for the Devil to be IN Hell. When he got to Hell, he would at least have someone to play golf and have a nice chat with.

Mort thought for another minute, and then walked back to the cafeteria and took the yellow shirt from the chair Devil had been sitting in, which no one had touched yet. He thought to himself ‘At least I got a fine yellow shirt on this odd day’. That made him cheerful, and Mort whistled to himself about his free shirt all afternoon.

Insperation in Unlikely Places

Boredom is the best inspiration there is to look around and see things you’d never look at otherwise, things you’d take absolutely no interest in. I discover this time and again when I’m in situations that I think at first I’d rather not be in. Today, as a cashier in my voluntary role at the convention I’ve been at for the past few days, I had one of the moments where I realized this. With nothing better to do, I took to people watching. Ah, the things you see!

A girl sitting on her father’s shoulders, obliviously sucking her thumb and looking curiously and bright-eyed around at people, while her father is fighting with her mother on the phone. A man, looking strangely at a volunteer, going up to her and asking for something and insisting on shaking her hand at the end of their talk, giving her a shifty-eyed look. A woman in a flowing maroon dress walking with her arms linked with those of her two friends, happily conversing and laughing with them, while pausing every now and then to give orders to people- she is one of the supervisors of the volunteers.

So many little stories happening all at once, all so full of emotions – anger, love, happiness, misery and agression. All these things happening in one not-so-large hall, all at the same time, and no one notices. No one will ever know just how many stories and events were going on that day, that minute even, all at the same time.

Israel Geek-Fest’ 2008

Oh, what a joy going to conventions is! On one side, there is a girl holding a big sign that says “OBJECTION” on it. On the other side are four or five hairy boys dressed all in black. In front of you is a girl with a ton of black make-up and a flouncy pink skirt. Behind you is a famous Polish fantasy writer. What could be better than being among your peers this way?
The iCon, as this fantasy/sci-fi festival is called, is a really great event that happens once a year here, in Tel Aviv. It is truly a geek fest, and it’s incredible. Last night, for instance, there were screenings of “Gamers”, which is a movie about role-playing college boys, and then “Zombie Strippers” which is exactly about that. Strippers who become zombies.
Tonight I am volunteering there, and although my schedule is super-full, there is something that feels really good about giving to this community, because I am truly an avid fantasy book fan and a lover of all that is animated or strange.