The Cute-Guys!

Years ago (it’s becoming increasingly unpleasant to think about just how many years ago), when I was an undergraduate, I had a biology professor who would refer to any and all animals, especially lab animals, such as red-spotted newts or African clawed toads, as “the guys” or more often “the cute guys”.

Lately, my job has been really stressing me out, but in the last 24 hours or so, I’ve had three really neat run-ins with the cute guys that brightened my outlook and lowered my blood pressure. Last night, a really cute beetle with these awesome three-pronged antennae landed on my hat and hung out there for a good 20 minutes, while I davened maariv (trans. “prayed the evening service”). I played with this particular cute guy a bit, watching it fold up its antennae when I blew on them or moved my finger too close to them. Eventually the beetle got fed up with my harassment and flew at a lightbulb. I turned it off so it wouldn’t burn itself. I was somewhat sad to discover, upon looking the creature up, that my little friend, whose good looks had so charmed me, was in fact an invasive pest known as the Japanese beetle.

Then this morning, while I was running on a dirt road through the woods near camp along my usual route, I saw these two really big dark brown dogs that I didn’t recognize standing in the middle of the road. When they saw, me they started running towards to the woods, and from the way they ran, I realized they weren’t in fact dogs, but juvenile black bears. I stopped and listened to the bears crash through the underbrush for a few seconds before I continued running.

And this afternoon, after a long morning of meetings with counselors, teaching class and trying to study but being interrupted constantly by counselors with questions about the play, rushing in cloud of annoyance and stress, I saw this beautiful monarch butterfly flitting along the path, and I stopped to watch it for a minute as it would settle on the ground and then take off again flitting back and forth with no apparent destination or direction. This little colorful thing hovering over the dull, dusty earth seemed almost too beautiful to be real, like some kind of animation drawn into a frame of ordinary film, the way they used to do in the days before movies were made on computers.

In conclusion, thank God for the Cute Guys. Even when they are invasive pests.

Do it on my butt!

Last night during Shabbat dinner, the five year old child of one of the rabbis here in camp came up to my table. A couple of us were teasing her by tapping her on the shoulder when she wasn’t looking. She really liked this and kept telling us to “do it on my back.” This evolved into a game where she would say “do it on my back” and I would pretend not to understand some aspect of the instruction, no matter how explicit she tried to make it. The more dense I pretended to be, the more the child became frustrated and amused until she was literally rolling on the floor with laughter yelling “DO IT ON MY BACK!” Eventually I ‘caught on’ and tapped her on the back. Then it was “do it on my tummy”, I poked her tummy, “do it on my head”, I poked her head. Then “do it on my butt”. Now, I wasn’t sure whether it would be appropriate or not to poke this child, with whose family I am only slightly acquainted, on her butt, so I demurred, but the child kept insisting, calling out more and more loudly “DO IT ON MY BUTT!” in the middle of the staff dining room, much to the embarrassed amusement of my table-mates and I. Eventually someone else at the table acquiesced and poked the girl on her butt, and she began delightedly crying out “You did it on my butt,” again much to the puerile amusement of our whole table. It became difficult to hold it together when she began gesturing with her finger towards her own butt to indicate the action that was “done”, resulting in what she could not realize was quite a lewd gesture.

There is something as disconcerting as it is hilarious about small children innocently saying and doing things that, coming from an adult, would be simply obscene. I hope my friends and I didn’t skew this poor child’s worldview too much with our poorly masked amusement at her childish phraseology and antics. With any luck she’ll have forgotten the whole incident before she gets to the age when elementary school kids begin to titter at every variation on the phrase “do it”.

A Day in the life of a Jewish farm

This week, on my day off from my surprisingly stressful job teaching drama at a Jewish summer camp, I visited the Jewish farm where I’m hoping to be living come September. This is what my day looked like:

1. 6:00 a.m. Blindfolded trust walk, followed by meditation on a dock, followed by readings of poems by the two American nature poets most beloved by hippies and Jews(I’ll buy the first commentor to correctly identify both poets a beer) followed by skinny dipping (or what we Jews call “mikveh“) in a pond with virtual strangers.
2. 7:00 a.m. Shacharit (morning prayers)
3. 7:45 a.m. Breakfast (with real French press coffee, which I haven’t gotten to have in over a year)
4. 8:30 a.m. Harvest cucumbers, weed carrots and leaks, tie up cauliflower leaves
5. 12:00 p.m. Three on three basketball. Every time someone asks me to play basketball, I am beset by a wave of social anxiety and insecurity that’s been stored away unresolved since the first and last time I tried to play basketball for fun in the 5th grade. I always decline. This time, after being repeatedly pressed to join the game, I acquiesced. I don’t know if it was the fact that we were all Jewish, or the fact that we were mostly hippies and punks or the fact that we were of various genders, or just the fact that all of us were adults, but much to my suprise (A) I didn’t seem to be all that terrible compared to everyone else and (B) if I was, everyone was so nice and chill that I didn’t even notice it. Is it possible I don’t hate sports as much as I thought?
6. 12:30 p.m. Lunch of delicious fresh local vegetables and pita with hippy-style hummus (light on the oil, heavy on the garlic)
7. 1:30 p.m. Mincha (afternoon prayers)
8. 2:00 p.m. Prepare toppings for a 40-person pizza party
9. 4:30 p.m. Job interviews in the grass, in the shade
10. 5:00 p.m. Causal inquiries into possible rides to the train
11. 6:00 p.m. Milk some goats.
12. 6:45 p.m. More urgent scrounging for a ride to the train
13. 7:00 p.m. Eat pizza baked by the former chef of Brooklyn’s best gourmet kosher pizzeria
14. 7:15 p.m. Last ditch effort to find a ride to the train
15. 7:45 p.m. Give up on searching for a ride to the train and decide to spring for a cab
16. 7:50 p.m. Discover that the local cab company is closed for the night. Search vainly for an alternative or competitor.
17. 8:00 p.m. Frantic final effort to get a ride to the train
18. 8:10 p.m. Someone I’d exchanged awkward OKCupid messages about a year ago offers me a ride to the train. Feel awkward accepting it.
19. 8:15 p.m. Give up on a ride to the train. Make arrangements to stay the night and go home in the morning.
20. 8:30 p.m. Run into the aforementioned chef, who offers me a ride to the train. Enjoy a 25 minute car ride through the New England twilight, enjoying the subtle beauty of the Appalachian landscape.

Aside from all that ride-scrounging, it’s hard to imagine that my life even for a few months could be so idyllic. Can I move tomorrow?

Overheard in Camp 2011 #1

Well, I have a list of about half a dozen posts I wanted to write related to my final weeks in Israel, and my very complicated feelings about leaving to come back to my other homeland. But before I got around to writing any of them, I was back here and immersed in my much-more-than-full-time job as Head of Drama at a Jewish summer camp not far from New York City. So, instead of blogging about all the things I’m sad to leave behind in Israel, or all the the things I’m excited to be coming back to in the U.S., or all the things I’m happy to be leaving behind in Israel or all the things I’m nervous about coming back to in the U.S., or about my recent adventures with the bureaucracy of the Israeli Rabbinate, I’ll just relate a brief dialogue between me and the six-year-old son of another staff member here.

6-year-old: You’re lucky you have a beard and a mustache.

Me: Why am I luck I have a beard and a mustache?

6-year-old: Because you don’t have to wipe your face after you eat.

If only.