Tel Aviv Diary - January 23-27, 2013 - Karen Alkalay-Gut
January 23, 2013
One amazing thing about Yair Lapid: he's straightforward. He may set our crooked political situation straight. And he actually worked really hard this year to get in touch with potential voters. But I'm an eternal optimist.
And I have 2 points against him. I didn't like his play - the one I wrote about a couple of years ago in these pages. I thought it was infantile. And I didn't like the way he read a poem by Rony Sommek last year at a reading. Oh yes, and there was a movie he was in that I saw because Orit was in the background. It had a stupid script. But these are artistic differences. And for all these reason I'm glad he's in politics. So while we're talking about voting, Citigroup and the Wall Street Journal are sponsoring "City of the Year." Tel Aviv along with New York and Medellin have made it to the list of the '3 finalists'.
It would require as many votes as possible in favor of Tel Aviv in order to win.
So if you like Tel Aviv, vote early and vote often - every day in fact:
http://online.wsj.com/ad/cityoftheyear
January 24, 2013 Enough local politics! We're going to have weeks of speculations before we get a government. It's time to say Happy Birthday to the trees and start planning a costume for Purim. Classes are over for the semester but there are still exams and papers and endless meetings, reports, catching up, mail, conferences, and more, much more. But none of it includes local politics. January 25, 2013 My wonder over the people in Israel never cease. Today, for example, Mohammed was overwhelmed with customers at the nursery because of Tu B'shvat. Everybody was buying plants and he was running out of change. So when he charged me 106 shekel for the plants and I only had a 200 shekel note, he gave me 100 shekel back and said, "Forget the change. We won't go to the Rabbi." And we both laughed at the irony of a Muslim using the Hebrew translation of the Yiddish phrase concerning serious issues demanding the judgement of a religious authority.
January 26, 2013 For the first time someone asked me seriously about my coming retirement (this summer). I answered that I'm not defined by my profession, or even my hobbies. Afterward I thought about what exactly defines me and it came to me - desire.
(Shawn Edri has been helping me put these on line. I wonder how these look to you. Let me know.) The trick with desire is how to let it show and how to help it grow.