1/4 Season Update

Things have been going well enough that I haven’t been compelled to write about something that was bothering me. Here are some things that have happened and things I have thought about since my last entry:

-ODWB gave me a clock as a holiday gift. I was grateful, but I am still suspicious. It seems like every night that I come back late there is some sort of work going on early the next morning. Once it was painting the hallway (which you wouldn’t think would be that loud, but he found a way to make it obnoxious and un-sleepthroughable) , once it was the roof. If he thinks I’m not on to him he is very wrong.

-My team is now 5-0. A couple games were close and the others were blowouts. We have been playing really well. We don’t play the best defense, and we don’t get the most rebounds, but we score like crazy. It’s been fun. But, our big guy, who is the leading scorer in the league, is gonna be out for a few games with a broken bone in his hand. Should be interesting to see what happens without him.

-I went to the grocery store a bunch of times and every time the cashier asked me if I was sure that I wanted to buy the free range eggs. They issue this warning about how the good eggs are expensive like its store policy or something. I would think that they would want people to buy them, but they actively discourage me. They make sure I know that there are cheaper eggs available, even if they can barely speak english. Meanwhile, buying alcohol? They aren’t carding you. Don’t speak Hebrew and dont have an ID on you, yet you’re paying with a credit card from an Israeli bank? They could care less. Buying honey nut Cheerios even though they are pricier than their impostor Israeli counterparts? Nothing mentioned. But I try to buy some nice eggs, which aren’t even that much more expensive than the cheap eggs, and they bother me about it every time.

– The team told me that they would get me a “new” tv when mine broke. I should know better by know, but I get excited anyway. After practice I drive off with the manager, who said we were going to pick it up. To me that meant “go to a store and pick a reasonably priced tv off the shelves.” What it meant was “go to a little shanty town in the middle of beer yaakov and take a TV from some dude who is apparently friends with the organization.” I had the sneaking suspicion we weren’t going to a store when we pulled onto a dirt road next to a construction site. I don’t have a picture of the place, but it looked pretty much like this:

There were extension chords coming out of it all crazy and weird dogs running around. The whole place seemed to be of dubious legality. We walked in to the “home” and literally unplugged an incredibly old Hyundai TV that people were in the process of watching. They didn’t seem to mind though. Maybe strangers coming in and walking out with their TV’s is a common occurrence. Also, the TV weighed roughly 800 pounds. This monstrosity had to be lugged all the way up to my little attic house, where I promptly found out that the colors were all messed up. Everything was bright purple and green. They eventually fixed the original, thank god.

– Our coach busted out the famous Israeli use of the word “proud.” Somehow the word pride is not in a lot of Israeli coaches vocabularies. Thus, during our pump up speech last game, the coach informed us that we needed to “first think about our proud! We must have proud!” Speaking of proud, I was thinking the other day about the speech I gave at the basketball end-of-the-year banquet my senior year of college. It was full of sarcasm and jokes and the coaches hated it.  When I heard that the next year the seniors were told to not be funny in any way, it really warmed my heart.

-I mostly get rides to the gym, because they stuck me in an apartment so far away, but when I do walk I have begun to revive an old pastime from middle school. I like to see how far I can walk with my eyes closed. This serves the dual purpose of making the walk more interesting and protecting my eyes from the sun. I lost my sunglasses pretty much right when I got here. I managed to keep them all of last year, so I can’t be too upset, but I have lost every pair of sunglasses I have ever owned. It’s getting embarrassing.  It’s not even like I have ANY clue where I put them. One day I am just like, oh damn, my sunglasses aren’t where I normally put them. And that’s that. I never see them again.

– I know that there is no gum that never loses its flavor, like in Willie Wonka, but there should be gum by now that holds its flavor for over an hour. I don’t think that is unreasonable to ask. Wrigley has enough money to run ads all over the place and sponsor the cubs and shit, but a stick of their gum gives me flavor for 2 minutes tops? Not acceptable. I think it is all a conspiracy. The gum making companies know that the more you chew the more you have to buy, so what incentive do they have for making a gum that lasts for hours or days? Gum companies are deserving of as at least as much moral scorn as tobacco companies receive.

-I see cockroaches in my bathroom all the time. They aren’t that big so I usually just observe them until they crawl into a crack in the wall. I wonder what they are doing in the bathroom. It’s the one place in the whole apartment without food in it, but its the only place I see them. I bet they have cockroach food in the walls and just come out for fresh air. It might be akin to the laziness I feel on days off. Sometimes it drives me to take a short walk, just to remember what the sun feels like.

-Everyone who has even a slight connection to my team is appalled at how long I have let my hair grow. I try to tell them it has been a lot longer before, but they refuse to believe it. I get asked when I am going to get a haircut at least 20 times a day. It has become a running joke. I went to a Shabbat dinner on friday and got grief from my assistant coaches wife. I hadn’t seen her in like a month, and she greeted me with a “wow when are you getting a haircut!” before she even said hi. This has only increased my will to let my hair keep growing. I could have cared less a couple weeks ago, but I am now a staunch defender of long hair drew. I know I don’t comb it or maintain it in the slightest, but it doesn’t look THAT bad. The worst is when the head coach disses me, cause he has the most bizarre haircut ever. God bless him, good guy, but I cannot come to grips with his hair. I wish I had a picture to post. Everyday he gels all the hair flat to his head and then combs it forward. I have literally never seen anyone do this. If the team is going to rally against someone’s hair, it should be his.

-Speaking of that Shabbat dinner, what is a reasonable amount of time to be at someones house if they invite you over for dinner? I went with a teammate and his family, and we arrived at 7 and left at 9 30. But we had to put up an awkward, passive aggressive fight to get to leave. The people I was with were trying to say that the baby needed to go to bed, but the host would just say “oh he is having fun, sit, sit, do you want anything to drink? Sit, relax, its friday.”  And we are thinking “ya I know coach, but we don’t want to spend 4 hours here rehashing the same 3 topics of conversation we have been talking about all night. Thanks for the free meal but we want to get out of here.” To me, 2 and a ½ hours seems reasonable, but maybe it’s not because they were not even close to giving us an out. I think in their ideal world we would have sat around drinking tea and watching The Voice for 4 hours instead of one. Thankfully I had to follow the lead of people who drove me, so I could feign blissful ignorance of the idea that we might be acting rude.

-I was reading an article about a recent victorias secret show. I came upon a passage that talked about the set of angel wings that one of the models was wearing. It said that these wings took 7 years to design and make. 7 years! For a set of metal angel wings? What the hell could have been so complicated about making a tacky set of angel wings for a malnourished waif to shoulder during a forgettable fashion show? It took 4 years to paint the Sistine chapel! It took one year to sculpt the David! Don’t tell me these wings should have taken seven years. I stopped the article after I read that, so maybe there was a great explanation for why it was such a long process. I doubt it though.

-This article includes a picture of me and my super hairy legs. You can google translate it to find gems like “He was elected in the first round of the Wrangler class Israeli and since he was a bit downhill when he could not score more than 10 points, but it seems that upon his return from injury of Bet Yosef was designated the deadly duo of a strong bar business and now following the strike of the two would be Jermaine Hall role of an important writer.” Google, you make everything so clear!

http://safsal.co.il/article.aspx?id=18847