Rave #34: Confessions of a Chick-Lit Lover

The summer before 5th grade, I went to a Jewish summer camp. In retrospect, I was whiny and rather unappreciative, but in the moment I thought my much-declared misery had an edge of glamour to it, and that the appropriate way to handle my angst was to fill journals with abysmal poetry, rhyming "tears" and "fears" a total of 14 times. At camp, other girls received packages of Teen Vogue and Seventeen, chocolate bars nestled in the glossy pages. My mother sent me Pride and Prejudice, and my grandfather sent me a dictionary. I had not requested Pride and Prejudice, and felt insulted that my mother thought I would be interested in high-brow literature while on summer vacation. (I had requested the dictionary, as I needed to prove to my bunkmates, whom I tried to teach various word games, that "qua" was a word.) I knew, however, that Pride and Prejudice was overkill.

That day, sitting on the top bunk and ignoring the giggles coming from the girls painting their toenails on Alana's bed, mere feet away but emotionally leagues beyond me, was when I realized I was doing something wrong.

That afternoon, after I completed the hem of my challah cover, I borrowed a friend's (okay, acquaintance's) copy of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. That evening, I decided trashy young-adult writing was where I belonged. When I returned home, I tried to be furtive about my new passion for a while. My family is the type whom the charitable might say are well-read and the less generous call "supreme snobs". I knew they wouldn't be on board with the Sisterhood, so I tried to hide the telltale pink covers. This secrecy lasted until about October, at which point I couldn't stand it anymore and confessed everything.

During middle school, I read a few adventures and mysteries, but I kept coming back to the "young adult literature" (a legitimate-sounding, serious term I adored). I also read a lot of parenting books. My favorite books were the ones targeted at both high-strung middle-aged women and navel-gazing teenage girls. It's a niche market, but one book in particular -- Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes -- really spoke to me. After reading thirty or so parenting books and writing one of my own I felt I had gotten all I could out of that particular genre, and came back to young adult literature. At that point, however, I felt that I had outgrown my former love of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Gossip Girl, and the Clique books, and I made the natural step to trashy chick-lit.

In 9th grade, I was relieved to discover that my prep school cohorts were well-versed with The Devil Wears Prada, Nanny Diaries, and the entire Shopaholic series. The quality of the writing deteriorated: I went from The Devil Wears Prada (actually quite witty) to Jodi Picoult and soon I discovered myself in my dorm common room devouring The Truth About Diamonds, Nicole Richie's insightful social commentary and autobiography, thinly veiled as fiction. At some point, I stopped being embarrassed and furtive, and started saying things like "L.A. Candy? That's Lauren Conrad, right? It wasn't bad, but I think the plot dragged a bit, and definitely preferred Sweet Little Lies." It got to the point where a dear friend gave me A Shore Thing, by Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi, as a gift. A gift that I have reread more than twice, the actual count unimportant.

I read a lot, though, and there are only so many trashy chick-lit novels out there, so I'm forced to read real books sometimes. My standards are not high, but I do like to laugh, I dislike having to stand up to get my dictionary, and I find punctuation and grammar mistakes very distracting. I read a lot of essays -- I have read everything David Sedaris has ever written, for example -- because I like a quick pace. I love a good short story. I love a good travel guidebook. And now, in the spirit of the holidays, I'll give you some book recommendations. With my history of variety in literature and chick-lit and guide books, I feel like I have a unique perspective and am able to give some excellent recommendations. But be nice.

Most Insightful and Uplifting Parenting Book:

Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman. Very witty and clever.

Most Insightful Parenting Book That Makes Me Cry:

Reviving Ophelia, by Mary Pipher. Nothing else is even close. Also, I sent Mary Pipher a note saying how swell I thought she was, and she responded within 5 days with a lovely handwritten letter on personalized stationary. I was very impressed, both that she took the time to respond so charmingly and that she owns personalized stationary, something I've always thought of as the height of polished elegance and organization.

Best Trashy Young Adult Literature:

It Girl series, by Cecily von Ziegesar. Ol' Cecily was quite prolific, and also penned the Gossip Girl series. Gossip Girl was equally dramatic and fun as It Girl, but the former is set in New York City, which I thought was so unbearably glamorous as to be unrealistic. It Girl is set in a boarding school, something I at least knew a little about. Knowing very little about New York City, the whole series just felt too depressingly unattainable for me. This is probably why I went to boarding school and am not a famous New York fashion designer.

Best Young Adult Literature I Wouldn't Mind My Grandmother Seeing:

Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling. Oh my God, I was so into Harry Potter. I made a personality quiz to sort friends into houses. It had 25 questions. I'm a Slytherin, but at the time I really thought I was a Ravenclaw. I was foolish and young.

Best Trashy Chick-Lit:

Everything ever written by Lauren Weisberger (to be specific: The Devil Wears Prada, Last Night at Chateau Marmont, Everyone Worth Knowing, and Chasing Harry Winston.) I especially love The Devil Wears Prada now that I've experienced life at a snazzy magazine company, where I interned last summer. (People were actually really nice to me, if impossibly hip and thin, perhaps seeing that I was zero competition. Don't ask me anything else. I've already said too much.)

Funniest Book I Ever Read:

Travels with My Aunt, by Graham Greene. This book is so great. Plus it's legitimate enough that I can talk about it with my mother.

Best Writing I Can Talk About With My Mother:

Maya Angelou. I adore Maya Angelou. My favorite of her books (this one's an autobiography) is The Heart of a Woman. You know me, I love reading about a mother/son relationship.

Best Collection of Short Stories:

East West, by Salman Rushdie. A short story is perfect for Rushdie: poignant and charming and not too precious, short enough that he's forced to keep the action snappy. (I have not read Midnight's Children. I hear it's fabulous. I'm afraid it'll be like The Satanic Verses, which I understood was controversial and important, but which had a lot of words and was tough to get through. I'm sorry, okay?! I'm flawed.) Yesterday I read Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri, which was fabulous. Less poignant and delicate, but the characters felt more accessible to me than Rushdie's.

Best Celebrity Memoir:

I read a lot of these. They're marketed as memoirs, but really they're more like collections of essays, essays with conversational tones, often even more casual than this blog. The tones are aggressively casual, which, depending on how I feel about the celebrity, can come across as forced, adorably open, competitive, patronizing, or welcoming -- or, in the case of Sarah Silverman's The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, all of the above. Today I read Mindy Kaling's, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, which I giggled aloud at. In the past few months I have also read Tina Fey's Bossypants and Ellen Degeneres's Seriously... I'm Kidding (the ellipses being an awkward piece of punctuation the book would have done better without). I have read two of Chelsea Handler's books, but they gross me out and I don't recommend them.

That's pretty much it for now.

Let me know if you have recommendations. Just don't tell me to read Lord of the Rings. I'm not interested. Too many words and not enough romance.

Rave #33: Cracker Barrel

As most of my dear readers know, I'm currently on the Great College Search. And while I'm not considering schools too far from home (which of course I won't specify, since I've heard those Internet safety lectures and have a healthy amount of fear that Internet lurkers figure out where I live and start stalking me in real life and then become real stalkers and not just the Internet kind), I am considering some schools in rather obscure and unpopulated places; for example, in-the-middle-of-nowhere upstate New York, and all those great expanses of undeveloped, woodsy New England.

It turns out that when you're in the middle of nowhere your restaurant choices are limited. My family (and especially my mother, with whom I'm doing the majority of my college visits) has a staunch no-fast-food stance; therefore, the McDonalds and Burger Kings that litter the highway -- both literally and geographically -- aren't really options. Sometimes we do Friendly's, but my mother la jefe doesn't love 'em because she thinks the service is too slow. Somehow, that leaves Cracker Barrel as our go-to.

I'm don't remember how Cracker Barrel became our spot, but I'd wager that it was because we find it such high entertainment value. Not only is it entertainment, though, Cracker Barrel is an experience. An experience that I shall walk you through now.

When you walk in, you enter an enormous Old Country Store. You will know that it is an Old Country Store because it will say so on every t-shirt, bag, and fake decorative chicken egg. The Christmas decorations will be to your right, the giant display of Old Country Store stick candy in front of you, and the checkout counter and the maitre d' counter to your left. The restaurant piece of the experience will be nestled behind the checkout counter. Every single Cracker Barrel across America is organized like this. If you are a blind patron from Rhode Island you could walk into a Cracker Barrel in Tennessee and walk straight to the perpetually Christmas-themed votive candle display without hesitation. I can see how this would be marvelous for blind and very dedicated patrons; as for the rest of us, it's a smidge disconcerting to enter a Cracker Barrel and have an intense sense of deja vu, before remembering that this is just the corporate model of this Old Country Store.

Then the maitre d' will seat you. She will grin excitedly and ask if this is your first visit. You will struggle to remember if you've ever visited this exact location before, before giving up and shrugging, "oh, not my first visit to Cracker Barrel!". She will nod politely, but she will probably be internally judging you for not having committed this very special and once-in-a-lifetime experience to memory.

When you open the menu you will be blown away. Let me start by sharing the mission statement, taken directly from the official Cracker Barrel website:

"We aim to keep our prices fair and our portions hearty, making our fresh takes on traditional favorites some of the best values you'll find in any restaurant, at home or on the road. Whether you're craving meatloaf just like Mom used to make, our savory apple dumplins or the perfect breakfast at any time of day, Cracker Barrel is happy to bring you what you want, when you want it. After all, our mission statement is Pleasing People^®, and we're looking do do just that."

Now, they achieve their goal with aplomb. The portions are certainly hearty, and the restaurant's attitude is certainly enthusiastic. I'm all for Pleasing People^®, and appreciate a restaurants whose goal it is to Please Me^®.

The real comedic value comes in the menu. You will first notice a conspicuous lack of g's and the dismissal of superfluous letters. Peruse the menu, from "Fancy Fixin's^®" to "Vegetables 'n Sides" to "Beverages 'n Juices" and you'll find a remarkable number of letters dropped. Pick your meat, and then pick your vegetable (among your choices for vegetable are Macaroni 'n Cheese, Dumplins, and Steak Fries). And if you feel like it's all too much, you can go for lighter fare, like the Fried Chicken Salad.

Your waitress will come, and she will be zoftig and deeply knowledgeable about the menu; you will get the impression that she has not merely sampled everything on the menu but that she has tried everything in every possible combination. She will call you "babydoll", which seems so natural to your surroundings that you forget to roll your eyes. Then your waitress walks away, and you turn to your mother and ask "did she just call me babydoll?". Your mother will nod and wait, expressionless, for your incensed teenage response, but you will nod blankly and say "oh".

As you wait, you play the peg game, which I adore and am abysmal at. You will watch the people near you. There will be one southern family laughing exuberantly and squeezing each other's hands while shoving fried chicken liver down their throats, and there will be one family with a blond, coiffed mother with an expensive purse examining the menu and saying things like "God, have they ever considered a low-carb option?!". You will not be able to decide which family you identify with more; if you are a teenage girl you will leap into a brief and silent identity crisis before getting distracted by the peg game and forgetting about your angst.

Then, of course, a lot of food will come to your table. You will remark that the portions certainly are hearty. The food is not great, but there's a lot of it and you enjoy kvetching. You shouldn't order dessert, but you probably will. Your waitress claps her hands together and squeals "oooh, good choice!" when your order the pie.

You exit through the Old Country Store, and buy some stick candy for the road. Back on the road, you feel witty and clever, what with all those jokes you made about net carbs and "honest-to-goodness homestyle meals". Your belly is full and somehow the whole family is in a good mood.

Much better than Friendly's, I'd say.

Rave #32: Israel!

Currently, it's Saturday, July 2nd, at around 11am. At 4:30 this morning, I arrived home, having spent the past two weeks in Israel. Of course, I kept a detailed journal of the vacation, and have promised family members that a blogpost would be forthcoming.

My dear readers might remember last summer's post on the Michigan RV trip, and the cast of characters: my siblings, 12-year-old Guinea Pig 1 and 8-year-old GP2, parents, & maternal grandparents & uncle. They are the normal vacation group; this time, however, we mixed things up. Let me give you some back-story.

My father's brother, Uncle Punk (yes, I have both an Uncle Punk and an Uncle Sport), has been studying to become a rabbi. Part of the program requires living in Jerusalem; therefore, he, Aunt N., and their four children (Cousins 1, 2, 3, & 4) have been living there for the past two years. Cousin 1's bat mitzvah happened to fall during this time period, and so my immediate family (parents & GPs 1&2) along with my paternal grandfather, Papa, and his friend Barbara went to celebrate Cousin 1. And, of course, tacked a whole trip along to the bat mitzvah.

Because, really, if you're in Israel, you have to stay for more than a weekend.

And now, without further ado, the trip. Most but not all of this is taken straight from my journal, so feel very privy to my life, dear readers. (Though of course I've cut some segments of my private journal from my very public blog. I'm a sixteen year old girl. I have mean thoughts, which should not be shared on the Great Interweb. I'm kL@s5y like that.)

Sunday, 6/19/11
Arrived in Tel Aviv! We left JFK at 7:25 Saturday night, to arrive here at 1:30pm. At any rate, they said we'd arrive at 1:30; in fact, we got here by 12:45 -- "ahead of schedule", the pilots declare proudly, though that makes no sense. It's not like you can take a shortcut.

Upon arrival, we had a little bit of car drama. It was a crappy car, but my discerning father was willing to deal with it, until the door fell off. Literally -- my mother was trying to slide it shut when the entire door, the entire sheet, came flying off its hinges and into her hands. (Unfortunately, none of us had had our coffee, and missed the fantastic photo opp.) We got another car, the same kind, but with working doors. The type is "Jumpy", so, obviously, we'll be calling it the Hoompy for the duration of the vacation. (This makes sense because there's no J sound in Hebrew, and we're trying to blend in here in our oversize white van.)

After picking up the Hoompy, we returned to the Ben Gurion airport to pick up Papa & B. Because there were no real lunch options, we were stuck at a cafe-type place next to baggage claim. The coffee was reheated bitter schlock. (See the Yiddish? It's like I'm a natural-born Israeli.) While waiting for Papa and B., we had some more drama re: GP1's whisker. You see, he'd been cultivating that whisker for months; in February, he was devastated when my mom, seeing it for the first time, exclaimed, "hey, you have something on your chin!" and ripped it out. Now, he's fiercely protective of his one hair, and it's repulsive. It's about two inches long, white, and pokes out of a freckle on the right side of his jaw.

Naturally, as his big sister I was mocking both the whisker and his attachment to it. Eventually, I offered him a dollar to pluck it. He asked for $5; I agreed, but with the stipulation that I be the one to remove it, to allow for maximum dramatic tension. He consented, but I then realized I didn't have exact change. Luckily, my dad, equally disgusted by the whisker, provided $2. I had the nail-care set in my purse that a dear friend gave me when I stopped picking at my nails, and used the tweezers from that to do the deed. Now, everyone's happy: Jonah's $5 richer, and the rest of the world has one fewer facial hair catastrophe to cope with.

Papa and B. did eventually arrive, and then we headed over to Little Israel. Uncle Punk had recommended it, as it's very close to the airport, and, he said, gave a good overview of the geography and buildings of Israel. (Later, we learned that he had recommended it having never actually visited. Good job, Uncle Punk.)

This turns out to be true only if you visit Little Israel directly upon landing, before you actually look at a map.

Fortunately, I was in just that position, and found it charming, sharing none of my parents' and Papa's outrage over the various inaccuracies. Little Israel was cute, in a kitschy sort of way, a mini approximation of the country with tiny signposts pointing the names of each site, like "David's Tomb" or "National Fishery Plaza" -- that sort of thing. I especially enjoyed the Western Wall, where, if you pushed a button, little figurines would daven, mechanically bending at their tiny waists. It was especially nice because you could hear, faintly, ABBA piped in to the miniature baseball stadium next door. It's the sort of area that could use some more Dancing Queens.

All in all, Little Israel was pleasant enough, but I couldn't help but think that Disney could have done it better. I would have appreciated some brochures explaining some of the more esoteric spots ("Swine Palace"), and noticed there were loads of unavailed-of sponsorship opportunities. I lack the Hebrew to express that sentiment to the Little Israel workers, of course, which is a real shame. Still, there was a decent gift shop, so I guess they did okay: a solid B- performance, I'd say. But I'm a tough critic.

Then we drove to the hotel in Netanya. Nothing's fallen off the Hoompy, so far, but it's getting more and more unpleasant. My dad's driving -- it's stick-shift, which seems to make him less likely to check his BlackBerry at stoplights and more likely to mumble threateningly under his breath. I tried to stay focused on this journal or on the window, so as to see as little of the car's interior as possible. At one point, I spotted a bit of sticky gum plastered to the door. When I complained, B. tried to pluck it off with a tissue -- a valiant effort, except then she was stuck clutching a tissue with someone else's congealed, yellowy gum. Guess she didn't think that one through all the way.

Had a disconcerting dinner at the hotel. Five or so mangy cats strolled around us. At one point, my mom felt something brush her leg. She assured us it wasn't a cat, but refused to say what it was; after great interrogation, she admitted it was a cockroach. Later, I performed my standard hotel bed bug / scorpion check (we're in the Middle East! there could definitely be scorpions!) and found some suspicious black smears on my sheets. Luckily, I had the blanket I had brought for the plane, and slept under that.

Monday, 6/20/11
Used Hebrew for the first time this morning! "Boker tov!", I chirped to the people in the elevator. I think I said it with conviction, because one woman smiled and responded with a fast string of Hebrew. Everyone else smiled and nodded, so I did too. Pretty sure I passed as a legitimate Israeli right there.

After a thankfully uneventful breakfast, we drove to the Caesarea national park -- because, according to my mother, it's a travesty to miss a national park. Caesarea consists of various stages of ancient ruins, from around 100BCE to 1,000CE. It was well done, if hot, with the appropriate amount of gift shops. There, B. became enchanted with Roman Glass, which a certain shop claimed was extracted from where we stood. Later, as we walked around the aqueduct (surprisingly interesting), my dad picked up a bit of sea glass and offered it to her.

"Look what I found for you!", he said. "Roman glass!".

Skeptics.

Also, B.'s taken to petting the mangy cats that turn out to be ubiquitous in Israel, and GP1's started to do the same. Upon my expression, she said, apologetically, that she's a cat person. Ew.

Later in the afternoon, we all went down to the beach. I, at that point sick of but still civil towards my family, decided that was an opportune moment for some alone time, and went for a long walk along the shoreline. First, I encountered an old man, who grinned lecherously and said something in Hebrew. I said I only spoke English, and he came over, grabbed my hand, and kissed it; when he gestured at his cheek, as if I should kiss it, I pushed him away. He wasn't threatening at all, since I had several inches on him and he was well over 70; it's just that I don't get that close to old men -- or any men, really -- in Speedos.

Then I past a morbidly obese woman, well over 300 pounds, in a string bikini. I assumed she was wearing the bottom piece, but it wasn't visible under her rolls of fat. (If you remember a certain scene in Norbit, it was reminiscent of that. If you didn't see Norbit, don't.) She was scarier than the old man, especially when I realized that if I were to laugh (as was my initial inclination) she could probably have beaten me in a fist fight. Of course, she gave no indication that she was the violent type, and I've never in my life have been in a fist fight. Still, I like to think that if push were to come to shove I could hold my own. After that, I decided my family wasn't so bad after all and went back to join them.

GP1 then spent a while crawling around on his knees and stuffing sand in his shirt, making it misshapen and drooping. He kind of looked like a legless old woman with a massive, sagging bosom. My mom seemed to think this was perfectly normal. Then he started eating sand and letting his grainy saliva dribble from his mouth to the ground. My mom snapped at him at this point, chastising him because "spitting is gross". True, of course, but I really don't think that's the main issue here. He's an odd bird, GP1 is.

As GPs 1 & 2 and I stood by the taps near the boardwalk, rinsing our feet, I awkwardly flirted with a genial fellow. Our conversation went like this:

Genial Fellow: Did you know there's a water shortage across Israel?
Me: I don't believe you.
Genial Fellow: It's true! Like the Dead Sea!

Ahem -- upon further research, it turns out Genial Fellow was correct. Still, weird conversation starter. I mean, water shortages?! That's even worse than colleges.

Tuesday, 6/21/11
Breakfast this morning led to the discovery that the water GP1 was gulping down yesterday was from the hand-washing station. Serves him right for not being a caffeine addict. There have been lots of pastries at breakfast, which is marvelous, and probably the best part of the Seasons Netanya hotel. (Not to be the requisite malcontent of the family vacation [though, parenthetically, I'm a fantastic malcontent], but the hotel questionnaire had already been half filled in. Which I complained about. I also wrote that the rooms lacked clocks, washcloths, clean sheets, and drip coffee. Clocks. These aren't 5-star amenities I'm asking for here. Some spoons in the dining room would have been great too; for breakfast, my mom ate her yogurt with a serving ladle. Just sayin'.)

Afterward, we drove from Netanya to the Bahai gardens in Haifa. There was a bit of drama because the gum B. had so kindly removed from my door had somehow escaped from her tissue and gotten smeared across the backseat. She's denying everything, though, and claims there must have been a gum smear there all along. Sure.

The Bahai gardens were cool, but parts were partitioned off, which made my mother quite peeved, and we merely had several unsuccessful attempts at getting into different levels. Then we tried to find the Elijah house and the Stella Caves before my mother sighed heavily and said in her martyr voice "okay, if nobody elese cares about this let's just go to Tzvat and go to the hotel" and then ignored our feeble protests that maybe we could keep looking for the Elijah museum.

Finally arrived at the hotel around 6:45, after much difficulty and many of my father's encouraging mutterings to the Hoompy. I'm in a room with GPs 1 & 2; for some reason, they've gotten the real bed and I've been relegated to the cot. Then my mom took 45 minutes to rearrange the furniture and put the bags in different rooms. And then we went to the hotel restaurant for dinner. It was kosher, and surprisingly good; I had fish kebabs, sweet potato ravioli, and coconut cake. Most importantly, I got to show off my Hebrew: zeh ta’im!

Wednesday, 6/22/11
Oi, what a day. Too tired to do a good recap -- here's the bullet-point version:

8:00 - Breakfast opens. I go by myself, bringing my book (Toni Morrison's Paradise -- not exactly uplifting, unsurprisingly)

8:30 - My mom joins me at breakfast. I have some more fish and fresh bread and fish and pastries. Israelis are really good at breakfast, evidently.

9:00 - I go outside to the patio (gorgeous views) and read.

11:00 - My dad goes to pick up Gilad, our tour guide, from the bus station.

11:30 - With Gilad, we go to see some more ruins. This country has an awful lot of ruins. They've had a lot of wars. I'm starting to think "ruins" may be the theme of this trip.

12:15 - Ooh, Artists' Colony! Lots of great shops and poking around, but Gilad is a man on a mission and pulls us around to his favorite shops and artists. To be fair, they do seem to be the best, but I want to see all the shops!

1:00 - Lunch at a cute little cafe by a weaving shop. I have a great sandwich with sprouts, Tzvat cheese, olives, and cucumbers.

1:45 - More artists.

2:30 - Turns out Kaballah world center is located in Tzvat. Kaballah is weird. There's a movie; at the end, GP2 raises her hand and very earnestly asks if any women were involved. I refrain from offering up the example of Madonna. Kaballah lady doesn't look like she'd have much of a sense of humor about good ol' Madge.

3:30 - Oh hey, guess we're going white-water rafting on the Jordan river now! In an unprecedented move, Papa announces he's joining us.

4:00 - We're on the water! Moving very, very slowly. GP1 & my dad are rowing.

4:10 - I take GP1's place. We're cruising now!

4:20 - This is boring. My mom takes my place, after my gentle reminders that this is what makes couples strong.

4:35 - Okay, we're done. Some rapids at the end, but not too bad. Some gallant gentlemen help us out of the boat. JK. They're the Israeli equivalent of frat boys.

4:40 - The van to pick us up should be here at 5. They thought it would take us an hour to raft 2 miles. Cool.

5:00 - Yeah, no van.

5:30 - Finally, the van arrives!

5:40 - We're reunited with Gilad! We head to the Hoompy.

5:45 - My dad decides he has to change. he unlocks Hoompy but takes the keys, so we can sit in the car in the sun without air-conditioning.

5:55 - My dad returns. Now he goes off to buy water.

6:05 - Annnnd we're off! I ask Gilad to where; he says to dinner, thank God.

6:20 - Headfake! We're going to look at some more ancient ruins before dinner. Great, I think. Because that's what this day's been lacking.

6:50 - Okay, now Gilad's talking about the brave little man who single-handedly revived Hebrew. It's pretty cool, actually. Someone should definitely call Hollywood about that one.

7:30 - We finally sit down for dinner. It's great. Gilad does have excellent restaurant recommendations. The mint lemonade is especially divine. I have 5 glasses.

9:00 - I really, really have to pee. The restaurant doesn't have customer bathrooms, but there are public bathrooms across the street. They're really, really gross. I don't go.

9:30 - Back at the hotel! I pee. And all is well.

Thursday, 6/23/11
My dad demanded we be on the road by 8:30 -- not this crowd's instinct. First, we drive for a while -- I'm not sure where, since I'm stuck in the third row with GPs 1 & 2. Gilad talks about the history of the fern trees along the side of the row. I admire the scenery; it's a gorgeous area, all hilly and rocky and scraggly, which doesn't sound so appealing but really works quite nicely.

At 9:15, we ended up at the Benediction Church of the Miracle of Fish and Loaves. (Jesus multiplied 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread to make enough to feed 5,000 people and have 12 baskets of crumbs left over. Gilad spoke about how these numbers are important, keeping in mind that Jesus's audience was Jewish: 2 tablets from Mount Sinai, 5 books of Torah, 12 tribes of Israel. Cool, right?) My mom took lots of pictures for her mom, and I felt inappropriately dressed.

Then we drove (very, very slowly -- we were stuck behind a tank) to some more ancient ruins! A small town of about 70 families from around 500CE. We took lots of pictures pretending to stomp on grapes and turn the olive oil press. We also visited the town's synagogue, and Gilad explained the history of ancient synagogue architectures. And then GP2 was outraged some more about the treatment of women in 500CE (they couldn't come inside the synagogue).

At 12:30, we stopped at the Golan Heights national park. We saw lots of vultures and -- wait for it! -- ancient ruins! A church and Bedoin homes from 700CE. Then we looked at a pretty view of Golan Heights for a while. It was supposed to be in the shape of a camel, an allegation that had triggered lots of flowing prose and poetry, but I didn't see it. I never do.

After Golan Heights, we went on a river walk. My mom, based on absolutely no prior knowledge, assured us it wouldn't be more than 12 inches deep. When we saw a sign warning we might have to swim, my dad shrugged it off, dismissing it and saying it must have been written by their lawyers.

Since I'm foreshadowing so beautifully, I guess you know what happened next.

We all got soaked, of course. Papa bowed out early, at mid-thigh height; the rest of us kept going until hip height. At one point, we passed a group of Hasidic boys splashing around in the water. I had already hitched up my thankfully inappropriately-short-for-Benediction-Church shorts, and my parents helpfully suggested I whip off my t-shirt and walk through the group in a sports bra, thereby ensuring a pathway for us all. I didn't.

Now, it's important that I keep the times in here, because I need to make a point to my parents: we never eat lunch on time. Every day, I start getting cranky around 12:30, because I get hungry! I need to eat every few hours, a concept my parents don't seem to understand. Such as this day, Thursday, June 23rd, when we didn't eat lunch until 3. Oi.

After lunch, we went to some shops!

Just kidding. We went to look at more ruins.

I sat that one out. Ruins are hot, you know, and all the roofs have fallen down and nobody's bothered to reconstruct them, so there's no shade. And at some point, once you've seen 6 sites of 7th century ruins, it feels like you've seen them all. So I sat on a picnic bench in the shade near the gift shop.

On the way out, my mother had to take a picture by the national park sign (right -- this was another national park). She petitioned "all children who love their mother" to be in the picture again, a phrase that, quite frankly, she really overuses. And again, I had to remind her to shut Hoompy's door, because she was letting out all the AC.

Friday, 6/24/11
Exhausted -- this'll be very brief. Today we were in the Old City, and:

• Gilad gave a very long overview of Jerusalem's history
• We saw the city from some stunning vantage points
• I hung out in the gift shop while my family want on a a walk through the water tunnels in King David's Palace. (I'm quite glad I didn't do that -- it was a tight squeeze, and I get pretty claustrophobic.)
• We saw a church where Catholics go and lots of people clean the rock where Jesus was cleaned.
• Walked through the now underground outside of the Temple. It was interesting, but tight in some places and I got claustrophobic and cried a little bit and I think Gilad thought I was a total wimp.
• Walked through the Jewish quarters, briefly, and then through the Arab quarters, stopping for falafel.
• Went back to the hotel (Jerusalem Inbal -- quite lovely) and got ready for Cousin 1's Friday night Shabbat service.
• Went to synagogue, and...

SAW SARAH SILVERMAN.

She was just hangin' out in shul, praying along. First, my dad nudged me. "Who does that woman in front of us remind you of?", he asked.

"Uh, I dunno," I replied intelligently. "Sarah Silverman?"

"Yup." I stared at him.

"Not really?"

"She's in town."

AJKLDSFKFDSLFDKLDJKLS.

It was super exciting. After services, I knew that if I didn't say hi I'd regret it for the rest of my life. I came up with a script in my head -- charming and a little witty, but not trying too hard.

And then I said hi and shook her hand and she said, "Hi, I'm Sarah" all warmly and all I could think of was "Oh my God you are the coolest person ever I have such a girl crush on you and I want to be you because you're actually my favorite Jew; like, when I make lists of cool famous Jews you're always number one, even in front of Adam Sandler, because you're so funny and adorable and winsome".

Luckily, I didn't actually say that -- I did, however, blurt out "Oh my God this is so cool, I've been staring at the back of your head for the past 20 minutes trying to figure out if you're really you" and she smiled awkwardly and then I just shouted "anyway, SHABBAT SHALOM" and ran away.

Probably the highlight of my life so far.

Saturday, 6/25/11
Ugh, again, dunno how much energy I have to write. It'll be a list of highlights again:

• Breakfast at hotel; tried and was unimpressed with 5 pastries.
• Cousin 1's bat mitzvah, from 9:15 - 12:15. You read that right; three hours. They're reform, too; I wonder what Yom Kippur services would have been like. The entire thing was in Hebrew, Cousin 1's speech and everything. I kvelled. She really did an extraordinary job. I'm so, so proud of her.
  
• Lovely luncheon outside the synagogue. The watermelon was cut like sharks' teeth!
• Went back with Cousin 1 to their apartment to get a bathing suit. Ended up staying for 2 hours.
• Turned out non-guests can't go to the pool. Dangit.
• Uncle Punk, Aunt N., Cousins 1-4, my parents, siblings, & I go to a local park instead.
• We go out to dinner. We have to drive out of Jerusalem; everything's closed for Shabbat. We go to a falafel place.
• Poor Cousin 1's exhausted. She's been to 4 bat mitzvah parties and hasn't gone to bed before 12 once this week. She just wants to go to bed. Guess nobody in the family asked her what she wanted to do. We're jerks. I feel very guilty.
• Return to hotel. Check Facebook. Write this. Go to bed.

Sunday, 6/26/11
This morning we had a later start, leaving the hotel around 9:30. (I think Gilad was a little peeved.) First, we went to John the Baptist's mother's weekend house, where John met his cousin Jesus for the first time (both were in their mothers' wombs). Then we visited a park where Gilad pointed out ancient irrigation techniques: the plug is released from a giant cistern, and various pathways are blocked off to direct the water to flow in a certain direction. It was surprisingly cool, and the sort of thing GP1 would have loved were he not clutching at his side, head, stomach, or throat, and moaning in agony. (GP1 is on the cusp of adolescence, and is therefore on the whiny, angsty side.)

Then we visited the Chagall windows in a hospital. The windows were gorgeous, but, as my dad pointed out, the sanctuary they were displayed in was lacking -- low ceilings, cramped space, etc. We then went to lunch, a cute place with sandwich sort of fare (I went with the goat cheese toast, as did my mother -- zeh ta'im!). My mother was despondent that herbs and flowers are so much cheaper in Israel. After a leisurely dessert (ice cream) and iced coffee slush (exactly what it sounds like, and quite yummy) Gilad was eager to move on. We stopped by a few picture taking spots, including an old Jordanian bunker, from before Israel's independence, before dropping Papa and B. off at the hotel.

We went back to the Old City, since we hadn't yet seen the Wall. The Wall was a funny experience. One one hand, I was pissed about the stark gender inequality; the men got a full library, podiums, indoor sanctuary, prime placement closest to the ark, while the women were crammed into a space about a third the size of the men's with a few folding chairs. On the other hand, I actually really liked praying with only women; that's not an experience I've had before, and it was something more meaningful than I had expected. I wasn't really into the Wall because of its connection to the holy Temple, either; there are other underground places that are actually closer to where the ark stood. I liked being with all those women, and all the prayers stuck in the Wall. I loved knowing that so many prayers, hopes, pleas, and thanks have been made by women in my place and surrounding me. I love words, and I love writing; for me, writing out my prayers made them seem more important and lasting than the ones I say every day or at synagogue. Of course I believe that God hears all prayers, but the ones stuck in the crevices of the Wall are blessed by other people as well -- everyone who comes to the Wall sees them, and they're part of a greater, more tangible collection than my private, day-t0-day prayers.

After the Wall, we went to find GP1 a tallis. After much deliberation he finally found one. It's excellent, made of a heavier, woven fabric, with stripes of blue and silver.

Though I'd been telling my parents all day I would have to shower before the bat mitzvah party, we didn't get back to the hotel until after 7 -- and the party started at 6:30. I was ready by 7:30, but my dad was furious it had taken me "so long" -- I don't think he appreciates what normal teenage girl turn-around time is like. And then he got lost on the way. You'd think he could have spent that time finding directions, but evidently not.

The party was fun, and Cousin 1 clearly had a great time. I'm really so proud of her -- if you're reading this, Cousin 1, know that. The past couple of years have been rougher for her than for a lot of 12-year-olds, what with moving to Israel knowing absolutely zero Hebrew, and she's not only navigated them beautifully but she's really flourished. She's a good egg, that one.

Monday, 6/27/11
Exhausted again, so I'll just list what we did today.

9:10 - Left Inbal. I was ready at 8:30.

11:00 - After a stop to see a view and take a family photo, we arrive at Masada. We see a video giving an overview of its history. It's not very good.

11:30 - We take a cable car up to Masada instead of walking. It's very crowded, but I'm grateful.

11:33 - We're at Masada! We sit down. It's at least 90° here in the shade. Gilad talks a lot about King Herod the Paranoid.

11:55 - We walk around Masada. It's over 100° in the sun. We see some homes, gates, kitchens, views, etc. I'm a fan of the bathhouse, which is shady and cooler.

1:15 - Okay, it's too hot. GP2 and I retreat to the shade near the cable car, next to the water taps. We play various games involving throwing water at the loser. I win most of them. She reminds me there's a drought.

2:00 - We all take the cable car back down the mountain.

2:03 - Lunch in the Masada cafe: cold falafel and old salad!

2:30 - Stop at the Masa gift shop. If you buy Ahava products you get a discount at the Dead Sea! Obviously, we do.

3:00 - 15-minute hike in the blazing midday sun to a waterfall and pool. Several Birthright groups are there. (Note to self: Birthright = good way to meet nice Jewish boys in college?? Check that out.) We all go in the pool. Gilad photobombs some Birthright group pictures. I'm liking him more.

4:00 - Dead Sea! The water feels oily and heavy, not gritty and salty like I had expected. My feet sting; I have lots of scrapes and cuts from painful shoes, and the salt water makes me acutely aware of all of them. (We were advised not to shave a few days in advance, because the water makes any cut really, really painful.) We -- including Papa, but not B. -- float around on our backs. My mom works on a flailing/scooting motion, which she calls "boating along". It's not very effective, and she doesn't get very far.

5:00 - We move on to the black mud. This is fun! We slather it all over ourselves and pose for lots of pictures. I'm concerned my dad and GP2 aren't wearing enough sun screen, though -- it's super, super sunny.

5:30 - We rinse off in the outdoor showers. I realize we should have gone back to the ocean to rinse all the mud off before trying to get the salt out too.

6:00 - I guess I'm supposed to feel rejuvenated now? Except we definitely didn't leave the mud on for long enough. We drive to our next hotel, Ein Gedi.

6:15 - Ahem. Now I learn that Ein Gedi isn't actually a hotel. It's a kibbutz. Oi.

6:20 - I'm in a very small room with GPs 1 & 2. Oi.

7:15 - Dinner at the kibbutz dining hall. Pretty good, actually.

8:15 - I finish Paradise. Weird, weird book. I'll have to reread it.

Tuesday, 6/28/11
I was rudely awoken at 7:30, since the rest of my family, for some inexplicable reason, wanted a tour of the kibbutz at 8. I skipped that, instead breakfasting for an hour and a half. The coffee was the best we've had in Israel so far. I finished packing -- we were only in the kibbutz for one night -- and we were on the road again in the Hoompy by 9:30.

We arrived at a camel-riding place around 11. I was rather apprehensive -- I direct you to my horse experience in Costa Rica. The leader of our little caravan was a kindly and portly gentleman who had a fondness for bad jokes about my "dangerous and wild" camel, Margo. (I was very glad she was named Margo, and not some intense Hebrew name I couldn't pronounce.) The camel ride itself wasn't bad; a camel's wider than a horse, and I'll be walking with a stiff waddle for a couple days, but with a gentle, hip-swaying gait. And the Negev was stunning.

After the camel tour, we refilled our water bottles, and set out to see ... RUINS! A town from the 4th century of about 40 families, with two churches, lots of arches, and many, many cisterns. I am an expert on cisterns now. I have to say, though, it seems like a pretty awful place for a town. We're in the middle of the desert.

We didn't have lunch until 4. It was at a Bedoin camp, which was pretty great. We met our host, Salman (name derived from the Arabic "salaam", or peace) on the highway, since getting to the camp involved some off-road travel and there's no way we could have found it on our own. We were greeted by 4 little boys, between 4 and 10, and Salman reemerged with a huge mound of dough.

As he beat it, he spoke about Bedoin life. The four children surrounding him were his; he has 8 children, all sons; two, it seemed, were from a first marriage. We sat on long, flat cushions, cleverly arranged around the fire so that the wind would blow the smoke away from our eyes. Salman spoke glowingly about the health benefits of camel milk (evidently an up-and-coming cancer treatment is made of it?), but with some prodding admitted his sons don't drink it. (There's no time for him to visit the camels and milk them. They roam free in the desert; when asked where, he waved expansively towards the hills and shrugged, "oh, until Egypt" -- about 50 miles.) He spoke about the need for preservation of tradition, and about problems with the rising generations, but sends his sons to the local, public Jewish school. Salman was a very conflicted man.

Then we ate Bedoin bread, a thick, chewy, layered texture, and rice and vegetables and chicken. (I avoided the chicken -- I've been a vegetarian for about a month and a half now). We scopped it up with a thin, spongy, pita-like bread with our right hands.

Now GP1 wants to be a Bedoin.

And I want to go to bed. We're staying at an Isrotel tonight -- giggle at the pun with me now...

Wednesday, 6/29/11
Exhausting day, made worse by my brother's brattiness. His new thing is declaring arbitrary lines of separation he doesn't want me to cross. He's been singing nonstop, too, and telling inane stories to GP2 that involve lots of awful accents. Anyway, today we:

• Tried to leave the Isrotel by 9, but GP1 threw a hissy fit about seats, so we didn't get off until 9:40.
• Drove for half an hour; stopped where Lot's wife was turned into salt; took some salt rocks.
• Drove for 2 hours, GPs 1 & 2 singing nonstop and GP1 continually poking me.
• Stopped at Ben-Gurion's burial site.
• Drove another hour.
• At 1, arrived at a mountain where Gilad talked about David and Goliath. He assured us it wouldn't take more than 25 minutes -- 30, tops.
• Left mountain at 2.
• Stopped at a gas station to grab yogurt for lunch, and met up with Uncle Punk, Aunt N., and Cousins 1-4.
• We all headed to a dig, which consisted of three parts: (1), climbing underground to a cave, an ancient basement, where we rummaged around for ancient trash (pottery, bones, charcoal, etc.) and put all the chalky dirt and rocks into buckets to carry up; (2), creating an assembly line to carry all those buckets above ground, where we sifted through them; (3) going on a tour of other, fully excavated basements or cisterns with Gilad (others went on an ancient plumbing crawl -- I Just Said No.)
• Drove to Tel Aviv; set up in hotel, a pleasant but uninteresting Sheraton.
• Dinner at a restaurant on the boardwalk called The London; uninspired food but fine.

Thursday, 6/30/11
Let's skip the prelude and go straight to today's summary.

8:00 - Breakfast at Sheraton. Fantastic bread pudding.

9:10 - Depart with Gilad.

9:30 - Cute town, the first Jewish settlement in Tel Aviv. There are some adorable shops we don't visit.

10:00 - Papa's not feeling well, and takes a cab back to the hotel. Aw. We poke around some more.

11:30 - Visit the Panach museum, the rebel resistance group integral to Israeli independence in the 40's. The group is described as the "silver platter" on which Israel was served -- that is, sad and beautiful and dead. It's well done, but it's a real downer.

12:45 - LUNCH! For the first time in days, lunch before 2:30!

2:00 - Tour of secret underground bullet factory of the 40's. It's cool, but my mom points out that we'd be horrified if it were found in Iraq. It's true; kibbutz children played 6 yards away from bullets and explosives. I'd totally sue the daycare.

4:00 - When we drop B. off to be with Papa, GPs 1 & 2 demand to stay too. My mom produces an eloquent and impassioned speech about the gravitational pull of the hotel.

4:30 - My dad, Gilad, and I set off to drive around Tel Aviv.

5:30 - We return. Gilad and my mom set up to talk business in the lobby.

5:33 - My dad gingerly asks my mom if we can go shopping. He promises GP2 he'll "buy her something pretty" if she'll join us. She doesn't. Ouch.

5:36 - My mom delivers a speech on how she's been sitting, waiting for us.

5:50 - My dad points out my mom hates shopping. Ooh, rookie mistake. Tiff escalates.

6:15 - And we're off shopping! My dad can't enjoy himself. Every other sentence in in reference to the ticking time bomb waiting in the Sheraton lobby.

7:30 - We return.

8:00 - We leave for dinner, without Papa. It's a fancy Italian place. My dad's annoyed at the concierge for recommending it, since he had asked for fast and kid-friendly. It's quite good though.

9:30 - We return to the hotel.

9:31 - My dad and I see a sign advertising "fish massage".

9:33 - We have to ask.

9:35 - Ooh, they stick your feet in a fish tank, and these little minnow-like fish eat the dead skin. GROSS.

9:36 - We go up to the rooms.

9:40 - GP1 throws a hissy fit about the light. GP2 goes to our parents' room to read. I whip out my journal, turn on the lights, and begin to write.

Friday, 7/1/11
Our last day in Israel! I'm currently on the plane, writing this. It's a hellish flight (Delta), and I'm next to the woman with the world's smallest bladder. She's visiting the WC, on average, every 45 minutes.

This morning, I woke up in Tel Aviv. I was at breakfast at 8; Papa, whose birthday it is, joined me at 9, and the rest of the family was down by 9:15. Once we were all fed, my parents, GPs 1 & 2, and I headed to Independence Hall, where Ben-Gurion & Co. declared Israel an independent state. Then we went to Carmel market, this fabulous, outdoor, craft-y market. It was crowded, of course, and my mom whined for about half an hour, clutching on to the rest of us and shrieking when she couldn't find someone within half a second. When GP1 spun a glass dreidel on a table with more glass Judaica, she pounced on that as a sin so egregious it was imperative that she bring him back to the hotel right then and there. So then it was down to my dad, GP2, and me, and it was much better.

We stopped at a pizza place for lunch, and slowly meandered back to the hotel (around 2:30). Then my parents and siblings went down to the beach. I joined them for about 5 minutes, before realizing that it was way too crowded and that I was miserable. Instead, I hung out with the free WiFi in the lobby, chatting online with friends in the air conditioning.

We had some difficulty finding the restaurant for dinner, but, luckily, my mom had made the reservation for 6:30, an hour and a half earlier than necessary to meet our 12:04am flight. (It was at Suzana, a cute place that offered great people watching. I counted 3 pairs of harem pants in an hour!). We got to the airport with little drama, and still had time to walk around and have fresh-squeezed orange juice. And now we're on the plane, coming home.

Article: College: A Junior's Hesitant Start

Haven't posted in a while; sorry about that! I thought I'd share with you an article I originally wrote for my school's paper. I hope it'll give some insight into what's going on in my life (and why I don't post as much anymore).

On our first meeting with our college counselors, all of us juniors were instructed to write letters to our parents, telling them whatever we wanted about the upcoming college process. I rolled my eyes, and then tried to peek over at what my friend was writing, but she glared at me and shooed me away. I glanced around me; everyone was scribbling furiously.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” I wrote. Then I looked up again. All my classmates seemed to be engrossed. I sighed internally, because it’s tough being the only malcontent, and tried wracking my brain for something suitably heart wrenching, poignant, and comforting.

“Oi. Love, Emma.”

Oh well.

The next step was in mid-January: Junior College Planning Weekend. Junior College Planning Weekend mainly involved lots of reinforcement that college is a match, not a prize (one charming representative made a magnificent analogy of the college search process being like finding a pair of jeans: just because it fits your friend, parents, or Emma Watson doesn’t mean it’ll fit you, and just because it’s super fashionable doesn’t mean it’ll be flattering on you. I couldn’t agree more. Stay away from acid-wash jeggings, kids). I rather enjoyed Junior College Planning Weekend, if only because I have a not-so-secret fondness of inspirational lectures on how I will succeed and I will find a place that’s right for me.

Then, we had our first group meeting. I settled down in the computer lab, all ready to hear some more optimistic babble on how I will succeed and I am a super star. Unfortunately, it didn’t go like that.

On the first meeting, you see, we were introduced to Naviance. Naviance is the college planning website Porter’s uses, and contains the schedule of upcoming college representatives’ visits, various personality tests that lead to various career path tests, and that great tool, The Graph.

The Graph is a terrible thing to behold, looming large and pixilated. You click on a school, and the website leads you to its Graph. On the x-axis of The Graph is the SAT scale to 2400; on the y-axis is the GPA scale to 5.0 (please…). There’s a box in the lower left-hand corner formed by the average SAT and GPA of students from Porter’s who have been accepted. Then, scattered around The Graph are dots of each girl who applied to that school in the past 10 years: green if she was accepted, red if she was denied, blue if she was deferred; a diamond if she was waitlisted and then accepted/denied/left in waitlisted purgatory, a square if she was accepted regular decision, an x if she was denied regular decision, inside a little circle if she applied early decision, and with a little yellow triangle if she applied early action. Then there’s your mark: a big empty circle.

Needless to say, I called my mother and cried. Not only was I not getting into college, I sobbed, I wasn’t even sure that I was reading The Graph correctly. Who can’t even read a graph?!

Her response? “Oi.”

Over the course of the next several days, I spent an inordinate amount of time on Naviance. It became an obsession; I couldn’t stop clicking on schools and staring at The Graphs. And then, about a week later, I stopped. I mainly stopped because I realized I was averaging an hour a night on Naviance (ahem – no judgment, I’m baring my soul here) and perhaps that time could be better spent studying my Spanish flashcards (that’s the type of perspicacious insights colleges look for, I hear).

Soon afterward, I had my first individual meeting with my college counselor. I spoke about myself unintelligently for 30 minutes, and it was marvelous. My college counselor was very lovely and warm, and really made me feel like a super star (I like constant validation, okay?). It was then that I realized that maybe this college search wouldn’t be so bad after all. I started to dream of road trips, visiting various schools along the way. I began to dream of comparing every single quaint coffee shop of every single quaint college town I will visit. I began to dream of lots and lots of free pens.

I’m still apprehensive, don’t get me wrong. I’m still a little nervous, but I’ve accepted that college is better than the alternative (well, during my Naviance-induced craze I did briefly harbor fantasies of bopping around Europe, eating lots of pastries and walking around lots of pretty gardens, before realizing that “professional European traveler” isn’t really a viable career option. Anyway, I’ve resigned myself to college). Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. That’s what seniors are gleefully telling us juniors right now: it’s just the beginning; it gets worse- just wait until senior fall. What they’re also saying, however, is that we will be okay. We will be anxious, overwhelmed, and frustrated, and then we will be okay. It’s not just the seniors; everyone – our parents, college counselors, baristas, grandparents, teachers, admissions representatives, and inspirational speakers – assure us that we will be okay. Why not believe them?

Rave #31: The Royal Wedding

Today was a great day.

Today was a great day, you see, because it was touched by holy matrimony.

Today was a great day, because my second-favorite couple in the entire world, William and Catherine, got married. (My first-favorite couple would be my own parents. What can I say?) Unfortunately, I was not invited to the wedding, nor do I live close enough to be among the million-strong who stood outside Buckingham Palace. In fact, there is a pesky 5-hour time difference between me & the royal festivities. No matter; I woke up at 4. And I watched every single moment of the wedding, beginning to kiss recap. And it was fantastic.

I could gush about the dress -- absolutely stunning, of course -- or about how dashing Harry is -- very -- or the endless array of gorgeous hats. These were all glorious moments, of course, but that's not why I watched it. Harry was part of it, of course, and especially this moment, which I extend to you in giddy delight:


And the hats were divine too.

But still, this moment was monumental in other ways. Friends have been accosting me all day, demanding to know why I'm wearing a floppy hat and walking with a spring in my step, and, when I explain that I'm delirious with delight over the royal wedding, look at me with disdain. Some of the more cynical launch on rants about absurd monarchy and tax-payers' money and what it means to be in the 21st century. They don't get it.

The royal family is a symbol. They represent British history, and represent British culture. They are our (pretend I'm British here -- I've been doing so all day) poised, polished, beautiful selves. They represent Britain in a way no Prime Minister could, because they are removed from politics. They represent the people and not the government.

In this age of Jersey Shore and Spencer Pratt we need real romanticism more than ever. Today, we got just that. Today, we put aside our cynicism. We held back our clever remarks, and we watched two people who love each other get married. I wasn't the only one. Over a million people stood outside Buckingham palace to watch the newlyweds kiss. BBC estimated that over 2 billion people were watching this moment on TV.

Think about that. 2 billion people. There are currently around 6.9 billion people on Earth. 40% of the world doesn't have access to toilets, so let's just say that at most 40% of the world's population has access to a TV. (I made up that number, but it feels plausible.) 40% of the world is 2.76 billion. Therefore, approximately 72.5% of all people with the ability to watch the kiss did so.

That, to me, is the most extraordinary thing. For one moment, 2 billion people came together to watch a kiss. One million people staked out spots for days to wait outside to see one half-second kiss. (And it was two! The royal couple kissed twice! They listen to their people!) How rarely do one million -- that's 1,000,000, guys -- people literally stand together to celebrate love? How often do 2 billion people -- that's 2,000,000,000! -- turn on their televisions at exactly the same time so that they can all watch a fairy tale?

That's why I woke up at an ungodly hour. I'm ecstatic for the couple, of course, but I'm also happy for the rest of us: we proved we care. We're not always apathetic lumps of disdain. We like princesses. (Oh all right, so she's now officially the Duchess of Cambridge.) We like romance, and we like happy couples in love. We're good, we humans are. We're good.

Rant #33: Sample Swine

As you all know, I love free samples. Nothing makes me happier than walking into Starbucks and seeing that delightful stand of lemon cake bits neatly presented in their individual mini cupcake wrappers. (I'm currently sitting in Starbucks, writing this; I had one of those lemon cake bits approximately 43 seconds ago. I like to think the Starbucks goddess is my personal muse. [Please see me for my opinion on the new logo.]) One of my favorite things to do at noon on Fridays is to go to Costco and graze on all those marvelous samples for lunch. I always pop in to Bath & Body Works for a squirt of free moisturizer from the sample bottles.

Thus, anyone who stops me from taking a sample is the scum of the earth.

Last week, you see, I was at a marvelous coffee farm. At the end, naturally, there was a quite extensive gift shop, with lots of -- you guessed it! -- free samples. There were about 15 bowls of various treats: milk chocolate covered coffee beans, dark chocolate covered coffee beans, chocolate and coconut covered coffee beans, raspberry chocolate coffee beans, etc. In each bowl was a little spoon to scoop up one -- one -- piece. I, naturally, tried one -- one -- of each. I was happy, and, as I turned to leave, a woman walked into the gift shop.

She was a slightly zoftig, well-coiffed woman; a mother, perhaps. She walked into the shop and made a beeline towards the samples. We made eye contact; she grinned, and I grinned back. She stood next to me, with her hands on her hips, and sighed contentedly.

"Ooh, they all look so delicious," she sighed. I nodded in fervent agreement, and stepped aside so she could have a full perusal. She sidled over to the chocolate and coconut selection, and licked her lips. The spoon was right there.

"Oh," she said, "I'll just use my fingers". And with a self-deprecating laugh, her plump fingers dove into the bowl and emerged with a handful of chocolate -- about 10 beans, a third of the entire bowl. I watched, aghast, as she threw them down her throat and attacked the hazelnut brittle. I couldn't stand it, but I couldn't bring myself to confront her, to speak to this brute; I merely let out a low, disgusted hiss, spun around, and stomped out of the shop.

The spoon was right there. This woman knew that. She just thought that she was above the rule, that spoons were for plebeians, the little people, the unwashed masses. Not her. She was special. So special that people should feel honored that her hands had fondled their chocolate.

Oi. Vey.

These are the same people who double-park their cars and yell at cashiers. We do not care for them.

I know that none of my beloved, charming readers are this crass, but I implore you all to tell your friends and polite acquaintances: do not be this woman. Don't ruin the sacred system of the sample for me. The store is already giving away free stuff; the least we can do is be appreciative and polite.

And with that, I bid you all good night.

Rave #31: Costa Rican Adventures

I take Spanish at school, and I am positively abysmal at it. In class, I sit between two friends, and spend much of the class time catching their eyes and looking at them desperately. (Sometimes they explain things to me, and sometimes they shrug apologetically.) I spend far more time on Spanish homework than I do on that of any other class, and my parents have various bribing techniques in place, contingent upon my grade in Spanish. I’ve come to accept, however, that I’m just not good at Spanish. (I reassure myself that I have other strengths, like hula-hooping and [English] word games. I figure that this is the last year I’m required to take a language, and so next year I can drop Spanish and spend all that glorious free time doing something I’m better at. Perhaps I’ll suggest a hula-hooping course. I should look into that. But I digress.)

Thus, when my mother announced that we were going to Spanish immersion school in Costa Rica, I was skeptical. I didn’t, however, have much of a choice. Ella fue la jefe. I was going to be spending a week of my vacation from school in school. Spanish school, with my parents, 12-year-old brother GP1, and 8-year-old sister GP2. I was not pleased. Then I realized, however, what Costa Rica means. Costa, as in coast; coast, as in beach. I consoled myself with fantasies of free time, lying on la playa with frothy drinks and trashy chick-lit. At least I’ll be on the beach, I thought. Visions of sand and blue skies got me through the grey, drippy, interminable month of February, and by March 4th, when I left school for vacation, I was positively excited about the upcoming trip. 

On March 12^th, the day before our departure, I turned to la jefe.

“How many bathing suits should I pack?”, I asked cheerfully. La jefe paused, and put her hand on her hip thoughtfully.

“Hm, I’m not sure,” she answered. “I guess the school will have a pool. Yeah, you should bring a bathing suit.”

Something about that didn’t sound quite right. There was almost an implication there that… “We’re not going to the beach?!” My mother looked surprised.

“No, we’re not”, she replied. “Why would you think that?”

Oi. Vey.

At that point, it was too late to back down. I had my plane ticket; I had an assigned host family; I had taken a Spanish placement test. (It was a 100-question, multiple choice out of 3 test. My mother had gotten a 38%, a smidge better than a monkey hitting keys at random. My father got less, as he refused to answer many of the questions – he was a quitter monkey. I received a 42%, and counted that as a victory.) I had to go.

We drove to the airport. We checked our many bags – carry-on’s for overachievers – and went through security. We waited a little bit. We bought a few magazines. We waited a little more. We boarded the plane. We sat down; it took off. I read some exceptionally fantastically bad chick-lit, and then I fell asleep. When I woke up, we were in San Jose, Costa Rica.

We arrived Sunday afternoon. We were met by a charming woman from the language school, who, after initial hola’s, spoke to us solely in English. She asked if we were wearing sunscreen. I assured her I was. Once the other group arrived – about 15 middle-school students (oi) – we departed for Santa Ana, about 20 minutes from San Jose, where our host family lived.

Turns out Costa Rica’s very, very green. During our ride, I stared out the window at the green. It was, in all honesty, stunning; in the distance, amongst the rolling green hills, nestled jewel-colored little houses and the occasional gently sloping field. We passed a fruit stand set up along the side of the road, complete with a toothlessly grinning old man, and I was delighted. This is what Latin America is, I thought! Mangoes and coffee and green and toothlessly grinning old men! Jewel-colored houses on green backdrops! It was perfect; graciously foreign and respectfully Disney.

Then we left Disneyland.

I heard the town before I saw it: the buzz of cars, barks of dogs, and shrieks of children. The houses were small, surrounded by heavy gates. Shop fronts were dingy, and mangy dogs roamed the streets. There were a few vendors set up along the road, but M told us that we shouldn’t eat any fried street food, as you never knew how old the oil was. I reached into my bag and blindly gripped my Merriam-Webster English-Spanish dictionary. I clutched it, my talisman, and desperately hoped Santa Ana would have Internet.

It did. In one dark, dingy Internet café. (Erroneously named, as I found out, as one couldn’t even buy a cup of coffee there. There were just rows of poorly-lit cubbies.) Luckily, my school had Internet, and I was able to check email / Facebook / very important political news (read: Lindsay Lohan’s outfit choices for court [doubly parenthetically: the skintight beige thing was not only wildly inappropriate but also wildly unflattering]) there.

Living with a family was a new experience for me. I’ve been to developing countries before, but I’ve stayed in pleasant hotels with pretty views. You could say it’s been the Disney-sanctioned version. This is not to say that I was anything but a tourist in Costa Rica; obviously, I was. (A phrase I uttered continuously throughout the trip was “lo siento, a mi madre le gusta tomar muchos fotos”.) This is also not to say that I was in a scorpion-infested run-down shack. (Though more on scorpions later.) The home I was in was fine. It was very clean (every morning, I heard my host dad sweeping the courtyard at 5:30!), and perfectly pleasant.

I’m perfectly aware I sound like a spoiled brat right now. I’m not trying to. (But then, of course, who would ever want to sound like a spoiled brat? It’s a sin of obliviousness and carelessness.) I really want to give a sense of my trip, and I do think that the culture shock was a part of the experience. It does not, unfortunately, reflect too well on me. But please bear with me as I finish explaining my home-stay.

The couple my family stayed with was very sweet. Let’s call them C, the wife, and V, the husband. They spoke absolutely no English – or at least, spoke no English with us; I’m pretty sure C could speak some English but refused to because we were trying to be immersed – and gesticulated a lot. (That worked well, because we too like to gesticulate.) C cooked for us every morning and evening, and even did our laundry every day. (We didn’t ask, of course, and requested numerous times that she wouldn’t, but she did anyway.)

I liked them a lot.

I have a side bar here. Skip the next couple paragraphs if you’re in a rush.

Several months ago, a group of students at my school who had gone to Tanzania over the summer to help build a school made a presentation about their experience. They used phrases like “our Tanzanian sisters” and “we formed a new family”, and read letters from the students that said things like “I love you so so so so so so so so so so much.” They were in Tanzania for 2 weeks. Now, it’s a constant struggle for me to keep from turning into a jaded, world-weary brat. I tried to reason to myself that it was a different culture I knew nothing about; maybe, in Tanzania, that’s what you say to people you’ve known for 2 weeks: “I love you.” Maybe they really were thrilled to have the building expertise of 20 16-year-old girls. I could certainly see how they were happy to have the resources the girls from my school brought: the notebooks, pens, building supplies, and laptops. At the same time, however, I didn’t think I could ever call someone whom I met 2 weeks ago my sister.

I have a sister. I have a family. And while I truly love my friends – especially at an all-girls boarding school, I really do think I have an extraordinarily special, close relationship with those I eat, study, and live with – they are not my sisters. Some of my friends, whom I have known for several years, I do say I love; some, whom I have met more recently or known at a more superficial level, I don’t. But even my closest friends, whom I really and truly do love, are not my family. I certainly would not call a woman whom I was with for a week my “second mother”.

This is all to say that I enjoyed my week with C and V very much, I think they’re lovely people, it’s very unlikely that I’ll ever see them again, and I’m okay with that. That’s the end of my rant.

Moving on to Emma’s Language School Experience.

Every morning, we walked the 5 blocks to the van pick-up station (a central spot in the town) and were supposed to be picked up at 7:45. It was about a 15 minute drive to the school, and, depending on how late the van was and how many people we drove by whom our driver knew and had to chat with, we arrived at school anywhere between 8:05 and 8:20. Class started at 8:30. We had 2 hours of classes, and then our mid-morning break; we resumed at 11, and went until 1. By my mid-morning snack, I was exhausted, and by lunch I was ready for bed. The 4 hours I did was the less intense option. Some people had class after lunch for another 2 hours. Those people missed out on very important cultural activities, like afternoon siestas.

There were two students in my class: me, and a lovely girl my age we’ll call L. She was much better at Spanish than I. In the first class, our teacher asked what we missed the most while in Costa Rica. (A tricky question, obviously, as I couldn’t be completely honest, since our teacher was both a proud Costa Rican and related to my host family, but I also had to answer the question somehow.) I went first. I said I missed hot water. Then L went. She missed being able to exercise. It was hard for her, because it wasn’t safe for her – a single, young girl – to go out by herself, and she couldn’t get to the gym. That was the type L was.

Everybody I spoke to before I left was confident that my Spanish would improve. Everyone seems to agree that immersion is the only way to learn, that my confidence and accent and vocabulary would inevitably improve. My advisor urged me to go for it, just to speak, even if I felt nervous or unsure, as that’s the only way to learn. And so, to all the students out there considering traveling to a foreign country under expectations that your linguistic skills will improve immensely, I feel obligated tell you about my experience.

I was in Costa Rica for 10 days, and that was not enough to make much of a difference. My accent did not improve; my grammar did not improve; my vocabulary may have improved by 20 or 30 words, but not markedly. After a few days, however, I did notice a change: the vocabulary I did know came to me faster, and I could form better, more complex sentences using various grammatical tenses faster. My oral capabilities got to the same basic place as my written Spanish.

However, I don’t think I would have improved without my language school. (Called Conversa, in Santa Ana, and it was fantastic. I highly recommend looking at it if anyone’s considering Spanish immersion school!) I don’t think immersion itself would have gotten me very far – people speak very quickly with lots of big words in the real world. When you are learning a second language, I think some things have to be explicitly taught to you. At least, I have to be taught things like grammar tenses and sentence structure; these sorts of things I wouldn’t pick up through immersion itself. Perhaps a better language student would be able to pick up on these through lots of conversation, but I needed them to be spelled out for me. They were, in Conversa, and it helped me tremendously.

Thus, if I have a new theory on learning languages, it is this: small class sizes are paramount. Small class sizes are always beneficial, of course, but I really think they’re essential for languages. Currently, my Spanish class – at a relatively posh private school – has 12 people. That’s a quite small class, comparatively. But 2 is much better. I learned more in 5 days of 4 hours a day (total: 20 hours) with a class of 2 than I had in 6 months of 50 minutes a day (total: about 80 hours) with a class of 12. I’m fully aware that that type of schedule would not be feasible in the real world of other subjects, homework, sports, clubs, etc, but it’s still something schools should consider. If I feel overwhelmed with a class size of 12 – like I can’t fit in all I want to say, or ask the questions I need to, or get the attention and clarity I want – what about kids with classes of 20 or 25?

Another thing I noticed: in Conversa, we worked entirely orally. Now, at school, I have a truly marvelous teacher, and what I’m about to say is not an indictment of her. However, at school, we do a lot of written work. That’s important, don’t get me wrong, but oral comprehension is more useful. In school, we do much of our oral comprehension and verbal evaluations in the computer lab. There, each student is hooked up to a computer headset, listens to the instructions, and speaks into the microphone. Later, the teacher collects the recordings and grades them. This, obviously, has some practical benefits, and I see what this system is used. Unfortunately, it offers no way of in-the-moment corrections and prodding from teachers. Speaking to nobody is a very unnatural way of learning a language. By the time the student goes back to see her grade and comments, the moment has passed, and she can barely remember what the topic was, let alone what she said.

Therefore, I think language classes should save 10 minutes at the end of class to speak one-on-one or two-on-one with the teacher. For example, my class periods are 50 minutes. 40 minutes is enough to cover new material; maybe we’d have to skip a couple grammar activities, but that’s okay. I suggest taking the last 10 minutes of class for two students to step outside of the classroom with the teacher and just talk. Talk about their days, what they did last night, their plans for the weekend (thus getting in different tenses!), whatever. It doesn’t have to be graded; it’s just an opportunity to practice speaking in a plausible, conversational scenario. It would also give the teacher a chance to see where each student is. While this is happening, the students left in the room could do something quietly; more grammar or vocabulary exercises, perhaps.

Moving on from Emma’s Theories on Language back to Emma’s Costa Rican Adventures.

On Friday, after our week in Conversa, my grandparents flew in to San Jose and met us in Santa Ana for the next component of our journey. We bid C and V adios and drove about 4 hours to Monte Verde. It was a difficult ride, winding around and over various mountains and valleys, with little pavement and many potholes. It was gorgeous, but there were few houses or people along the way. At one point, there was a sign: Escuela: 25km. We were excited, as it seemed to be the first sign of civilization in about an hour. We stared out the window, breathlessly waiting for la escuela. Finally – finally! – Nana saw it.

“Look!”, she exclaimed, pointing at a structure in the distance. “That must be the school!”

“No,” our driver said, “este es la cementaría.”

Dang.

We finally arrived at our hotel. It was very lovely, and GP1, GP2, and I ran to claim beds. As we were unpacking, GP2 called to me, “Emma! come here! I killed it!”

GP2 had found a scorpion. This was the first time I had seen a scorpion; it was about two inches long, black, and straight out of the horoscope page. I was not a fan. For the next three nights, GP2 and I shook our sheets and blankets out before going to bed. (GP1 was remarkably cavalier about the scorpion situation.) We didn’t see another one, but it was certainly stressful. (Though, upon further research, it turns out that those types of scorpions won’t seriously hurt you; their sting is compared to that of a wasp. It’s the lighter sandy, less scary-looking ones that live in California you have to look out for.)

We spent Saturday hiking in the cloud forest. I was a little nervous, having read about poisonous snakes, but it was very pretty – and very green. It was quite damp, though evidently it was the dry season. (I don’t think I would want to go during the wet season.) It was very pretty, and we were able to see lots of anteaters. (At least, I was pretty sure they were anteaters. They were not attractive animals.)

The next day, Sunday, I attended the Quaker / Society of Friends’ services. When I was little, I attended a Friends’ school, and loved it; thus, I was excited to learn more about the Quaker history in Costa Rica. In Monte Verde, there was a well-established Friends’ school, K-12, with about 150 students. Services consisted of a half-hour of singing various peace songs – there was a lot of overlap between Monte Verde Friends songs and Connecticut Friends songs, so I think I impressed them with my musical knowledge (or at least lyrical knowledge) – and then an hour of silence. (Many jokes were made amongst my oh-so-witty family members about how silence is the same in Spanish.) It was lovely, and everyone was very welcoming and warm. Quakers are really great.

Sunday evening, my family and I rode horses. It was the first time I’d ever really been on a horse, beside the requisite country fair pony rides. My horse was named Tequila, and he only spoke Spanish. He was the prettiest of the horses, but he had a lot of bodily functions. He wanted to go quickly, but I made it clear we were going lentamente. GP2 got the slow horse, Tojo. I was jealous.

Monday, we drove to our last destination: the Peace Lodge, about an hour from San Jose. The Peace Lodge was quite spiffy, and connected to a nature reserve. That afternoon, we visited the bird conservatory, the butterfly exhibit, and the monkeys. (I had to chastise some fat kid when he tried to stick his flute into the monkey cage. I made it clear that that was not okay. Geesh. Then his Ed Hardy-clad father came, and I scampered out of there.) My family then decided to go commune with frogs, at which point I left the group to have a marvelous massage. That night was glam night, a family tradition, so we all put on clean shorts and put on red toenail polish and were very glam.

Tuesday morning, we had our last breakfast in Costa Rica. I wandered around the reserve and got lost for a while, (estuve buscando por los gatos grandes) and then fed some hummingbirds. Then I stared at the monkeys for a little longer, undisturbed by flute-brandishing hooligans. (Fun fact: monkeys are my favorite animals. I think this is because they’re the most similar to humans.) Unfortunately, that was the end of our vacation; we drove to San Jose, got to the airport, used up our remaining colones, the Costa Rican currency, got on to the plane, and landed back in the good ol’ US of A.

Wow. That was the longest blog post I’ve done. Kudos to you if you read all that.

During this trip, I spent a lot of time reflecting on the differences between Costa Rica and America. Beyond the obvious – they’re one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world, we have an army, we speak different languages, they don’t call the police if 2-year-old are unattended on horses, etc. – there are more cultural distinctions. I’m not sure how to describe it; I’m certainly no cultural expert having been there for 10 days. I did get the sense, however, that life really is more relaxed out of America. People smiled more – every morning, as I walked to the bus stop, everyone I passed would greet me. With the houses so close together, everyone knew each other; when walking around Santa Ana, V would call out to everyone by name and ask about their families, dogs, and gardens.

You see, Costa Rica was neither Disney-sanctioned nor devastatingly poor. It had the rolling green mountains capped with clouds, and it had spiffy hotels with air conditioning. It was neither better nor worse than the United States; it was just different. That’s the point of traveling, after all: to remind us that there are different places. If you’re not happy where you are there’s always somewhere else with totally different people and customs.

In that spirit of deep personal reflection, here are some more realizations:

1. No matter how bad you are at a language, there is someone who doesn’t speak it at all. You are ahead of that person.
2. I am very glad that the United States sees the benefit of paved roads. I like paved roads. Paved roads are the way to go. If I could make a suggestion to the Costa Rican government it would be to invest in the highway system. (But keep up the good work, guys. Your country’s great.)
3. I am very glad that I have had a couple very good Spanish teachers. A good teacher makes all the difference.
4. I fully support leash laws. Dogs should be on leashes. See #2 re: suggestion to Costa Rican government.
5. My life would be much better if I were a monkey.
6. I would, however, not want to be a horse. All they do is work.
7. Horses are hard to ride. It must have been very hard to battle on horses.
8. My sister can be counted on to kill scorpions, if need be.
9. I’m lucky to have my own room.
10. I actually don’t drink that much coffee compared to Costa Ricans.

With that, I am done. Thanks for reading. Go forth and live la pura vida.