Eyze yofi

There can occasionally be advantages to being ADHD –rare though that is and always just as unintended as the usually unfortunate side effects. Yesterday after approximately 3 hours of actual sleep (kittens crying, bigger cats clawing at doors, Buffy cat trying to make a nest on my head and my thoughts unable to stop focusing on the newest albatross of a paper I’m working on) I bolted out of bed saying oya I have an early morning meeting, don’t I? I was out of coffee filters and out of instant coffee. In my coffee-deprived state I flipped open my appointment book and spotted that criminal meeting time seeming to confirm my worst fears and then flew into getting ready action. I managed to get out the door in half an hour, grabbed a cab, and hit the IDC just 2 minutes shy of the meeting time. Go me! Except that when I arrived said person was no where to be seen. The secretary was no where to be seen. There was some conference thing going on and so I thought, ah ok, they must be running late and I settled down to wait secure in the knowledge that I myself was not late. I had along with me my ever-present hebrew flashcards and so was not bored. About 45 minutes later the person I was to meet toodled along the hallway, looked at me and said “are you waiting for me?” Yeah, like we have a meeting scheduled. Why yes we do but not until 2:30. Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

Hours stretched before me before that meeting time. I got coffee and was able to corral those braincells that had been misfiring without it. I hit the tiny campus bookstore which, though the size of my living room, is absolutely stuffed with stuff that is really cool to look at. There I found a fantastic book which I am hereby recommending to those who are learning hebrew and who don’t have very many live hebrew speakers to get context from. It is the Oxford Student’s Dictionary English English Hebrew. I don’t know if they have one that is hebrew hebrew english anywhere in the world but if so I plan to hunt that one down as well as but in the meantime this book is awesome. It explains to the hebrew speaker the really confusing english language with all our idioms and so forth. But it also explains, totally without meaning to, to the english speaker all those synonyms and psuedo-synonyms in hebrew that are so maddening and it lets you know about the cases that that while we might use a single word to cover related concepts, hebrew is using two different words, one for each. For example, if you want to talk about an abuse of power or other kinds of resources, in hebrew you use linatzel (along with le’ra’ah –”for the bad”) but if you want to talk about the abuse of a person or animal or so forth (e.g., the child was abused) then you use the word lehitallel. And it gives you the nice string of interchangeable synonyms in hebrew for our english concepts as well.

I also got two cookbooks on supersale (9 sheks each), one devoted to pasta and one to salads because I’m getting really bored with my standard throw things together (and they always end up being the same things) for dinner. I spent the 5 hours until the meeting reading through the learn hebrew book and reading through the in hebrew cookbooks and ended up a nice shopping list along with at least 10 aha!s that have managed to stay in my pea brain as of this morning. Then I had the meeting which took, quite literally, all of 10 minutes. I’m actually not sure why we couldn’t have discussed everything we discussed on the phone but there you have it.

At the meeting we worked out that I will be on 3/4ths salary and position rather than full-time next year because of the BGU problem (the government doesn’t allow you to work full-time at one university and to also teach, at all, in another university –colleges are different and you can teach an additional half-time in them but I can’t because my hebrew sucks). Being 3/4ths allows me to teach one day a week somewhere else and so this should solve the problem. Unfortunately, it also means I’ll be making a lot less money –no salary and a half for me –with the headache of long travel hours for another year but, what to do? It also means that I will need to come up with an additional job, non-university related, to cover that additional salary I was expecting since living for two years on only a half-salary has put me way into the “you are in debt, you are deeply in debt” department rather than having the nice “you have a hell of a lot of savings, you almost have the 10% down payment for a really cheap house” department that I was in when I first arrived here. As well as the fact that a full-salary, with what you take home each month, will still leave me about 1k sheks short of what it costs to live each month in my cheaper-than-average Tel Aviv apartment. This is why people get married here –it ain’t for love, it is for the splitting of the cost of living heh.

Oh, that criminally early meeting time –it was the meeting this morning I had.