May 13-17, 2020
>
May 13, 2020
Yes, i have officially gone mad. Will it be fatal? will it pass? who knows? but i'm staying close to home to be sure.. i always thought i was used to living in uncertainty, but lately it hasn't been working well for me. i think i need some company. warm company.
i justwent into a zoom in Yiddish from Beit Leyvick. For the first time in my zoom history I couldn't get in, and wrote the secretary asking for a password. she wrote back that there is none, then my friend got a password from one of the organizers. it was wrong. i wrote again. my friend managed to get the right password and finally we were there. but i discovered i wasn't on the program. so i could have taken a nap with Ezi instead. But I stayed on, and discovered there were many things about Yiddish i didn't know.
one thing is that Israel, in choosing only Hebrew - flattened out the culture. This (I add) is true for Arabic as well. The more cultures we can absorb into our own, the more rich is our own culture.
we have a government! i don't get it, but maybe it will work. Mike Pompeo, who stopped by, even met our foreign minister, the first one he's met in ages. i wonder how that went. i wonder what he's doing here. there's too much to wonder about - i'm going to read some poetry and learn about meters- bahar.
May 14, 2020
we were going a bit stir crazy today after a whole mess with my bank account and had zoom meetings in the evening, so we looked to go somewhere where there were no people, something in nature, but, something near by. "The Samaritan Burial Caves" - said Ezi, and we went to a place near our house.
tell me you've got burial caves from the 2nd century in your neighborhood.
May 15, 2020
now that i'm beginning to see people, i'm beginning to see how we've all been affected by the sheltering at home period. One kid took a look at the steep hill and ran up without a moment of hesitation, while his sister screamed in fear at the sight of an ant. Couples - who have managed to stay together - are planning their divorce. i remembered that nine months after the Gulf War, there were babies. many babies. But this time I don't think that will happen. We're behaving like it's the end of the human race, not the beginning. Me, I have not been in touch with my friends, even though i need them very much. i just don't have all that much to talk about. but of course, i have been busy all the time. And everyone i ask says they too are incredibly occupied.
May 16, 2020
I usually write here at night and i'm totally exhausted and my guard is completely down. But when i got a letter pointing out that my previous entry had a broken link, with its pictures of the sea of galilee full of water, I took a break from my shelf cleaning and put in the quotation mark that had been missing in the code. And now that i've taken the break, I'm enjoying being idle.
we can't go out anyway because the heat is forbidding, and i've already accomplished almost everything i absolutely needed to do before lunch. I started to read the paper but all the news is already irrelevant. Politics keeps changing course, corona rules slackening are not about us - because we're more or less keeping away from people - especially sociable people. just the old ones. and kids from far away.
See the kid at the top of the hill?
May 17, 2020
Michael Kagan arranged a birthday party for me on zoom almost 2 months ago and only now am i getting around to seeing it. You may be here:
Karen's Birthday from Michael Kagan on Vimeo.
if not we can always try another zoom. my entire life is going on zoom nowadays, not only because of the corona but also the heat wave. and did you see what is happening to our government? we finally have one - and i for one am happy about it. for the moment. sorry to see Deri as minister of interior and Litzman as in charge of building. we can imagine what kind of deals are going to be made there.Do you realize that we just swore in the Minister of Higher Education and Water? Zeev Elkin. There are a few other pearls David Amsalem for instance.