Lieutenant Energizer

Last Thursday Dan was promoted lieutenant (see the picture here). We were invited to the well attented (more than 50 soldiers and officers) ceremony at his base. While we waited for the ceremony to start, some soldiers spotted Tom in uniform and asked me what is he doing in the unit. 'He is attending a course', I informed them. Mentioning the course number generated a big 'wow' in response. They don't know exactly what this number stands for (neither do I), but they know it's something prestigious. This reminded me the nuthouse joke, where the inmates laugh at joke numbers rather then the jokes themselves.

I fixed his new ranks on one of his shoulders and my 'being Dan's mother is a challenge' short speech was followed by general laughter. Three of his commanders spoke highly of his achievements and attitude, and told funny anecdotes to prove their praises. The highest ranking officer summarized it all by comparing Dan to the Energizer Bunny for his relentless activity.

Reminder

Came down from the office and saw the Italian restaurant closed. Weird, I thought, the times must be really tough. The nearby coffee shop was about to close. "It's Holocaust Day", came the waiter's answer to my enquiry. I felt so embarrased I forgot it starts tonight.

Usually we go about our daily business and don't think about the Holocaust. I'm not sure even the survivors think about it every day. For me the Holocaust is not just a big tragedy that happened in the past, it shapes the way I am, think, do or don't do things, even my children's life.

My Berger (that's my maiden name) grandparents lived in the small Hungarian village of Szentjobb in today's Romania. They were a traditional Jewish family with 8 children, a village shop and a soda water filling station. My aunt Ester survived Auschwitz and my father survived labor and prisoner camps. My other grandparents were luckily on the right side of the border, and after just one week of German-Hungarian occupation (during which they already implemented anti-Jewish laws), the Russians liberated their town (looking for watches to steal and women to rape).

My parents married late and I was a late and only child. They had no energy for more. My husband's story is similar. He is also a late and only child for the same reason. Our children have no cousins. I could have had a large happy family, to be loved by and lean on.

The murdered third of the Jewish people could have bettered the world. They won't compose music, write literature, win Nobel prizes for outstanding scientific achievements, raise new generations of followers. Their potential contribution is lost forever.

It's All in My Head

I used to look at healthy appearing people claiming to suffer from migraine headaches and couldn't understand what is this mysterious invisible disease that cripples them. A few years ago when I started suffering from migraines myself, it was like the famous Schweik replica "ormester ur, alazatosan jelentem meg egy szimulans diszno meghalt" (pardon my accentless Hungarian, it roughly means "Mr. sergeant, I humbly report another pretender pig has died"). And, thanks to medical tehnology, the disease became less invisible (see its MRI image on the left), although still mysterious, despite the excellent information available in the Mayo Clinic disease index (which I use and recommend to anyone in need of medical information).

After trying all sorts of remedies (accupuncture, medication, stress free lifestyle-I wish) I still suffer from migraines, but less often than before. So how does it feel? It goes in stages:

Stage 1: Optimistic Disbelief

Starting to feel a headache creeping up, but there's no way this will develop into a migraine. I'm not taking any stinkin' medicine, it will go away by itself. It doesn't.

Stage 2: Minor Realization

OK, it's not going anywhere without some help, I'm taking my usual OTC headache pill. 20 minutes and it's over without noticing. Or not.

Stage 3: The Show is On

It hurts so much that all I can think about is finding a dark, quiet place to lie down. I crawl into bed. Time for the heavy ammunition: my migraine pills. I fall asleep.

Stage 4: Victory and Fear

I open my eyes and the pain is gone. I'm happy. How long will it last? I'm affraid of moving or doing anything that might bring the pain back. It's like walking on thin ice. One wrong step and you fall into the icy water.

Stage 5: Joining the Partisan Movement

The self-fulfilling prophecy works. The pain is back and is here to stay for another day. Ammunitionless, I surrender. I'm trying a new weapon to defeat the bastard: I'm blogging about it.

Solidarity

I'm overwhelmed by the density of events over a short period of time. Tom's pre-IDF course ending celebration, Tom's enrollment in the IDF, his swearing-in ceremony, end of basic training, starting of professional course. All this coincided with our moving with the 120 boxes, all the things that went wrong, the dragging of apartment arrangements and proximity to Passover, when I'm already hosting family for the Seder (traditional Passover dinner). Work, gym, choir and vacation planning in the background.

In a previous post, I was trying to advice Tom whether to take the pre-IDF course and so far so good. He loved it, made new friends and will enjoy a paved path in the IDF. One tiny caveat though: he is sharing this path with youngsters just like him and misses the opportunity to meet 'kids' from different backgrounds. He is in a social bubble, just like myself, to an extent.

The IDF enrollment is an icon of Israeli life experience, parents and family accompany the youngsters to the recruting center and wave them goodby while they are being taken away by bus to start their 3-year journey in the IDF. This is the time for deep thoughts and mixed feelings. But how was I supposed to do this with giant Disney-like puppets dancing around on Purim songs from the loudspeakers? How was he supposed to have all the right thoughts and feelings with Disney figures in the soldierization (I made this word up) process, including vaccine shots? It was definitely weird being enrolled during Purim.

The swearing in ceremony is another IDF icon. Tom's ceremony was held in Sde Boker, next to Paula and David Ben Gurion's tomb. On the way to Sde Boker, which is 3 driving hours away from my house, I was asking myself how would parents living in the North (even further away) manage to come to the ceremony. The ceremony itself was moving but not very impressive. The highest ranking officer spoke about a little kid asking his father on Passover during WWII wether they will survive the war. The father replied he didn't know specifically about themselves, but there will always be a Jewish kid somewhere in the world to ask questions on Passover and a father to answer. The officer concluded that this is one of the main reasons for the IDF existence and activity. After the ceremony, one of Tom's comrades asked us if we have some food as he was hungry. (Bringing food to the ceremony and eating together with the soldiers is customary at such occasions.) We gave him a sandwich and offered sweets. I knew if Tom would have been hungry, any of the families present there would have done the same. I asked where his parents were, why didn't they come. "We live in a moshav (agricultural settlement) north of Nahariya, which so so up north that is already in south Lebanon", he replied joyfully.

Where Have I Been?

I've been busy packing, moving, unpacking, arranging, getting used to my new place. This is how our building was supposed to look like. Well, it's pretty similar, except the balconies on the right don't exist. The building was partially built on a eucalyptus grove and I can see the remaing eucalyptus tree tops from my large, 6th floor bedroom window. I'm watching the crows from above. The view from this window is so far the best feature of my new place. I watch it before falling asleep at night and first thing in the morning when waking up.

Tribute to Darwin

In many National Geographic programs I watch, carnivores kill and eat herbivores and sometimes steal other carnivores' prey. Although eating another animal while it is still alive (in one of the documentaries hyenas started eating a buffalo's behind while it was still alive) seems very cruel with my human eyes, that's how nature works. Carnivores have to eat other animals to survive, they can't eat grass.

On the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, we should reconsider telling childrens' stories that present carnivores as bad guys who eat the good guys. This stupid personification turns children judgemental, where no judgement needs to be applied. Wild animals just do what millions of years of evolution programmed them.

The birds on the treetop are programmed to soil my car parked underneath . Luckily cows can't fly.

Have you noticed my new tagline?

I changed the background color of the title to orange to draw attention to my new tagline.

Got to the end of the phrase and have to think about it? Here is the translation: nothing is constant, everything changes all the time. To notice the change, you just have to look long enough. How long is long enough? Depends what you want to observe.

To observe the decay of radioactive elements at the end of Mendeleyev's periodic table you only need a few seconds. To observe social changes, you need hundreds of years. For changes of rock formations, hundreds of thousands of years. So what if some observations take longer than a lifetime? Use fossils, archeology, written records, assumptions, predictions and simulations.

Just like time matters for observing change, mass matters for understanding the physical laws governing matter. Quarks behave differently from objects on Earth or from planets and solar systems.

Will one day be one theory to explain it all?