Udge, here comes! With apologies for delay!

Eons ago, Udge tagged me with six questions. SIX. A bigger piece of cake, he said. Right.~

Then Imshin, who does NOT read me EITHER (sorry Ed, still can't resist it. It's still not that funny but...), obviously, tagged me with a few more. This will be fun bcs altogether I’ll have answered this meme more or less three times! I am nothing if not thorough. If Imshin READ ME she’d have known this but she’s too busy riding her bike through gorgeous Israeli inner-city landscapes. To the river, to the river! [I was very mean now bcs I think I may have made Imshin squirm. Now she'll think I'm serious and worry abt it. Well, serves you right for NOT READING me. *Coughs up furball*]

Posteriorly (yes, no, it doesn’t work in English but I thought it would be fun to let you have a glimpse of how we Porties talk. We actually do say this.) I, in the throes of some death wish, decided to accept Lorem Ipsum’s interview invitation (she has some excellent news over at her blog, truly excellent! Mazel Tov!). It makes perfect sense bcs I am so good at actually answering said questions. What’s 3 months between friends. [Udge, es tut mir so leid, ich weiss, ich bin unmöglich. Die Fragen waren aber schwer, gell? Hajo-her! - sagt man halt so in Kar*sruhe. Just saying.]

And then Ana decided to compound it all, much like a fracture, by asking me what my favourite 6 songs are! Hell if I know. So here we are, here we go.

Dearest Udge:

1- How could anybody possibly get lost in her own room?

Well. I don’t much care for his tone, you know. Vaguely disbelieving, as though it’s not a perfectly normal thing to have happen.

When I was abt 10, my oldest girl cousin came to stay with us for a while during the holidays. This is what my room looked like:

(And this was my furniture as a child, only mine had prettier colours. It’s typical from the South of the country. It’s been in the family for ages and ages and my parents had it restored for my 30th birthday. They now kindly baby-sit it till I buy a bigger flat.)

The bed was huge and quite high, we were small, we shared it. I was sleeping on the side of the bathroom. I remember waking up in the middle of the night, needing to pee, so I got up. Now would be abt the right time to tell you that I get lost everywhere, have absolutely no sense of direction. I always know what the time is but rarely where I am. I didn’t want to wake up my cousin so I didn’t turn on the light, deciding instead to feel my way to the loo. Well, it all became very bizarre very quickly, see, bcs I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where I was. Now would also be a good time to reiterate that I don’t wake up in full possession of my faculties, and that it takes me a while to be able to face the light, synapse-impaired, let alone actually think. I had at some point decided it was safer to crawl (always safer in a hostile environment) and kept bumping into things but my cousin was sleeping so I tried not to vocalise my pain too much. I was becoming a bit desperate by then bcs I knew I was in my room but THIS COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE MY ROOM, HELP! All the rustling and soft muttering and solid surfaces hitting solid surfaces t must have finally been too much for my cousin bcs all of a sudden there was light, and I heard her say “What ARE you doing??”.

See, I was, at that precise moment, emerging from under the bed right in front of the table. I had managed to smoothly (HA!) sail on my knees all the way to the other side, under the bed. Where I had things stored, hence the bumping and the pain. I truly cannot explain how that happened but my family haven’t forgotten. You’d think 2 decades would be enough for the memory to fade, and you’d be so very wrong. That story is regularly retold, and always ends with “Now, how on earth…?” I don’t know how I did it, LEAVE ME ALONE.

2 - Who (or what) gives you strength?

I don’t know. I’m getting a bit tired of this strength thingy, sometimes I just want to have a proper fit and be done w it. I learnt from my parents that we shape our own destiny, that we are our own salvation. From my parents, and from books, in the beginning. Then from my Tweedle, we have been re-inventing ourselves for quite a few decades now and we’re finally getting to where we want to be. And my other friends, one by one. I think a lot of it is genes as well. I’m sorry but this nurturing thing? Very good and very effective but only to a certain degree. We are far more ruled by genes than we care to think abt. I suppose it’d be more comfortable to be able to think we can control it all but we cannot, really we cannot. And that’s ok too. I was born a bit of a warrior, was a preemie (7,5 months) and weighed 1,150 Kg (2.54 pounds). I screamed my lungs off right away, says my mother, and didn’t even need the incubator. Thus a trend was born.

I have always been string-willed and stubborn. When I was 5 I decided I needed to learn how to read. I remember it perfectly, I was in the bath and told my mother that some of my friends already knew the letters and I didn’t want to be dumb. My mother tells me she tried to convince me not to, my parents were worried bcs I was precocious and tried to curb it but I insisted till she gave in. She also tells me that by the time the bath was finished I could read “pai”, “pipa”, “vai”, “papa” - and thus a love affair with words was born, amen. But see what a stubborn little freak I was?

Also, I have a strong mystical streak. Which is fun bcs I am a scientist, see, and the conversations the two sides have would be enough to drive one batty at times. If I didn’t have a very healthy schizoid side as well, that is. (We Choose To Call It Healthy) I do believe things, most things are interconnected, and as much as w are our own salvation, some things just… are. Say, we can choose what path to travel but the ground is not for us to decide. Sort of. And I don’t believe in coincidences, I believe life, the universe, you name it, talks to us when we are willing to listen. So, when something very bad happens I don’t think the gods are out to get me. I don’t blame God. (I’ve talked abt this bfr so bear w me) God has nothing to do with this. God is above Good and Bad, Right and Wrong. God is neutral, like the Emperess in the Neverending Story [which is not, I repeat, NOT a children’s book. Please don’t make me hurt you.]. God is, Life happens, Death happens, it fucking hurts but that’s just the way things are sometimes. Can’t be helped. Not to offend anyone’s beliefs but probably doing it anyway, it’s beyond me how anyone can think God actually decides what happens (if you do, I’d love to learn abt it, maybe I’m missing something). Bcs if he did then he’d be a sociopath, who creates things like famine, and cancer, and war, and why, almost slipped my mind, fucking tsunamis??

Finally, let’s go back to books. Books are the best escape route there is and have saved my sanity and expanded my worlds more often than I could tell you. I stopped needing a religion when I learnt how to read - and write - but life was kinder than that. I now have my books, my God, a Judaism I am growing into, comfortably at last, and most of my mental health. This last bit varies, as you know.

3 - Which of your own habits annoys you most in other other people?

I can be quite curt and impatient but somehow, SOMEHOW, only I am allowed to.

4 - Which language will you learn next, and why?

I would love to learn Dutch bcs, after Hebrew, it’s the most beautiful language there is. And quite easy to when compared to German. Sadly, I sound German when I speak Dutch, which is a truly terrible thing. But I probably never will learn it. What I will do though, is improve my Hebrew, I’ve forgotten masses and hardly ever have a chance to use it. Bcs Hebrew was the last language I’ve learnt, and 10 years bfr that it’d been German, they must be overlapping in Broca’s brain or something and I sometimes short-fuse. When I do, my mouth opens and Germans starts pouring out in the middle of a Hebrew sentence, much to my horror. You really want to be careful w speaking German in Israel. What VERY often happens is, say, I’m at a zebra crossing and a car is coming on fast and I will shout “Acthung!” Acthung. Hardly a recognisable word. And then I want to lie on the zebra crossing and hope for a lorry.

5 - What would prevent you from opening a branch of the RSPCA in Portugal?

Money and knowledge. The latter can be worked on, don’t know abt the money. We don’t have any really effective shelter system, they are over-crowded and hardly ever funded and my fingers itch to do something. My dream would be to have a huge facility (pretty much like Battersea) where I could say YES to every single stray. Which would then be spayed. Which would then be placed. I would do pro bono spaying/neutering and have lower rates. I would have a hotel for when people go on holidays, and a pool for dogs w arthritis and hip dysplasia, and a homeopathic (for say, corneal injuries, much faster healing) and laser acupuncture (works marvelously for arthritis) centre. And high-school students would be welcome to volunteer and we would hold educational sessions throughout the counrty. And fairies would twitteringly brush people’s hair off their foreheads on really hot days and the lamb and the wolf would frolic* together but never bonk, bcs it wouldn't be that sort of place.

6 -Bonus question: Describe the treat(s) you're going to give yourself when the exams are over.

Exams + over... Uhmm. That and the Moschiach should arrive simultaneously. Moshiach will probably be a bit faster. All right, all right. I will buy books and read them! I will also probably finish the books I’ve bought and had brought over. And I will travel w Loverboy, probably to London, where I could meet my friend C. who was with me on the kibbutz. I haven't seen him in 4 years, hell. O perfid Albion, how much do I love thee? A whole bloody lot.

Ladies next.

[UPDATE: Didn't anyone notice how I first spelt "frolic"?? What are you doing, people, that you don't point out such a shameful typo to me? *CRINGE* I told you. Bloody German, mindfuck if I ever saw one.]