sir yes sir!

i promised myself i wouldn't start this post by commenting on how long its been since my last post, i've obviously failed at that , so let me just say that i'm no good at blogging regularly and that once a month isn't terrible considering my limited amount of free time and my immense propensity to procrastinate. Some of my more avid followers (faryn, i'm thinking of you here) might point out that i haven't posted in nearly 2 months, and to you i say: hush. 

you'd think with two months to gather material id have more to say, but to be honest i can't think of a damn thing worth talking about. I started the commander course i was talking about last month. I think the course is the source of my writer's block. nothing really happens, id be hard pressed to describe a typical day there, somehow the days just go by, we run a lot, sit through a lot of classes i dont pay attention in, and then every so often we go down to the field for a few days to run exercises. The people im doing the course with are really great, met some good guys from all the different infantry units, its a fun little melting pot of the infantry units, lots of rivalries and jokes about each other's units. All in all i'm having a good time, but im definitely ready for a trip home. i finish the course in july so hopefully ill be coming home for a few weeks towards the end of july. dont mark ur calendars yet, but im working on it. 

in other news, i moved rooms in my apt, so now my room looks a lot less like a prison cell, though i still have the serial killer fridge in my room. Another one of my american friends from the paratroopers moved into my place, so now its 3 lone paratroopers and my one israeli roommate who plays mother to us all. The 3 of us went to her family's house near haifa for the weekend a couple weeks ago, it was pretty cool, apparently her dad is a parrot whisperer. He raises endangered parrots and treats traumatized birds and rehabilitates them, all from his backyard. its like a crazy parrot zoo back there and he built it all himself, it was unreal. he also has a pretty sick white handle bar mustache. quite a character. 

as usual, im writing this post well past my bedtime. The clock is ticking and soon i will turn back into a pumpkin. i might as well get a few dreams in before that happens. 

ZzzZz

p.s.

tip of the month: 

check out the all songs considered live concerts podcast, lots of gems to be found. Especially this somali/canadian rapper named K'naan.

its been a while

Yes, the title of this post is also the title of a staind song. No, this post is not about staind, although i did like this song when i was a sophomore in high school. I was young and impressionable. And i hated LA.   

So anyways, its been a while since my last post, which seems to be the case with every one of my posts. I guess im just not cut out for the fast paced world of personal web diaries. I think i would do better with monthly hand written letters that i could stain with wine, oil, and wax and claim to have written under candle light in the trenches of southern lebanon. But alas those times are past and we are now in the digital age of 24 hour news cycles. No one has the time or patience to read anything in a format that doesn't allow for toggling between at least 3 other windows on their screen at any given time. In consideration of our ever narrowing attention spans, i will write this post in sections with clearly labeled Headers so that you can scroll to that which interests you most while you flip back and forth between gchat, ichat, facebook chat, and the nytimes (yea...right...). 

Jump School 

Short summary of what its like to jump out of a perfectly functioning plane at 1200 ft. 

"fuck! im gonna die, im gonna die, im gonna die!" 

JUMP! 

Whoosh 

::look up:: parachute opened

"WOHOO! this is amazing, so beautiful, this was totally worth eating shit for 6 months" 

"shit, i hope none of these bozos floating really close to me knocks in to me and we both plunge to our deaths...TURN THE OTHER WAY MAN! YOUR OTHER LEFT!!!" 

"uh oh...i forgot to release the 20 lbs sack of equipment strapped to my leg..." 

::click, click:: sack drops. 

"fuck, the ground is coming fast, im gonna break my leg, im gonna break my leg, im gonna break my fucking leg!!" 

::get in the brace position:: 

BOOM 

::jump to my feet:: 

"Holy fuck! i cant believe i didn't break my leg!! that was nuts! glad i got that out of my system. I don't think i ever need to do that again... Wait, 4 more jumps you say??? Fuck! im gonna die..." 

It's amazing how much can go through your mind in 50 seconds. 

So that was jump school. The constant fear of death or massive bodily injury interrupted by brief moments of complete and utter euphoria.  

Well, actually, that was the second week of jump school, where we did the actual jumping. The first week of jump school involved jumping from different contraptions that when filmed look and sound exactly like men being hung, and when experienced in first person, combines the whiplash of a high speed auto accident with the ball crushing force of an atomic wedgie. Good times all around. 

Thoughts that went through my mind on the climb to 1200 ft:

"Thoughts before jumping out of a plane is a perfect category for a top 10 list" 

"Top Ten Thoughts Before Jumping Out of a Functioning Airplane: 

1. Why??

2. I guess if my friends jumped off of a bridge i would follow them... 

3. This harness is killing my balls 

4. It would be kind of exciting to have to pull a reserve chute

5. Im an idiot 

6. Its really warm in here, it seems windy outside, i don't wanna... 

7. ::Quick melodramatic montage of people i love and will miss if i die::

8. Wow, its almost my turn, i can't believe i'm really doing this, and with chutes packed by the same army that hasn't figured out a way to transport a refrigerator out of my room in 4 months no less. 

9. Remember: count 21, 22, 23, look up, no chute? PULL RESERVE

10. ::at the door:: mind goes completely blank... JUMP!!!

War Week 

Hail sounds a lot like hell. Turns out thats not a coincidence. If i were to sum up war week in a word it would be, hail. Why? Because in addition to sleeping 3 or 4 non consecutive hours a day, eating one "meal" a day, and walking endless miles with about 80 lbs on my back, it fucking hailed. To say it hailed doesn't really do the situation justice, because if it was only the hail it wouldn't have been so bad. First it hailed, then it rained, for hours, and it took hours before the higher ups could make up their minds about what to do with us, so we sat in the rain while everything we touched turned to mud. Eventually we got moved to a semi enclosed building in a fake arab village thats being built for training purposes. We stacked about 60 guys into this place. Bodies covered the entire floor, equipment was stacked to the ceiling, and the rain kept coming in through the open windows. It was quite a cozy evening. In the middle of the night the commanders decided we had rested too much so they tried taking us out to conquer some hills, but mother nature wouldn't cooperate. The rain became a torrential downpour, so they stacked us into these random storage sheds they found in the field, hoping the rain would calm down. It didn't. After a couple of hypothermic hours in the shed we picked up all our muddy, soaking wet equipment and went back to our village to wait out the storm. 

In the morning, we gathered our muddy selves, packed on our muddy equipment, and were delighted to discover that our equipment, much like a girl in her freshman year of college, had put on some "water weight". We got in formation and began marching in the rain towards our next unknown destination. Prior to this point we had already spent entire nights walking with 80 lbs bags on our backs and open stretchers on top of them, so we thought we had seen the worst of it, but of course, we were wrong. This march nearly killed me. At one point early on we had to cross a river that was created by the prior night's downpour, and since we didn't have any engineers around, we just walked right through the water like mules. You can imagine that soaking wet socks made the remaining 9 km we were to walk that day pure joy. 

The worst thing about this march wasn't the socks though, it was the uncertainty. Every time we would get close to where we thought we were supposed to end up, the target would move. People went crazy, some guys would fall on the spot during our rare breaks and start crying. I was cursing my commanders, god, my parents for giving birth to me, and myself for volunteering for this torture. I would have shed tears but i was too dehydrated. By the time we reached our destination it was afternoon and we hadn't eaten in nearly 24 hours. We rested for a few minutes and then immediately began an exercise. Priceless. 

Im not really doing the week justice though. There were some positive aspects. Towards the end we got transported by blackhawk helicopter, which saved us a 17km hike, and gave us a pretty sweet view and some much needed rest. We also got a pretty unbeatable sense of accomplishment when we ran up the final hill with open stretchers on our shoulders, smoke grenades flying all around, and some solid israeli music blasting from the stereos where the grand finale celebration was being held. 

Well that about does it i guess. Im sure a lot more has happened in the past month and a half, but i tried to stick to the highlights. My mom has also been in town for the past few weeks, my dad got in today. Always a happy reunion... ::cough cough:: They're here for my ceremony on thursday where i get my red beret. All thats left is to walk 70k between wed and thursday and ill be a fully trained paratrooper. 

Wish me luck and kiss my feet goodbye. 

hi beseret

you know those moments when your sense of reality slips away only to be replaced by the inexplicable feeling that you're currently portraying yourself in the hollywood adaptation of your critically acclaimed, semi-autobiographical, first novel? no? does this just happen to me? well either way, thats what most of the last week felt like. 

Usually this feeling is brought on by blasting an emotionally loaded soundtrack through a decrepit car stereo while driving down a scenic two lane highway, on a sunny day, with the people you define as your best friends, on your way to nowhere in particular, or somewhere unimportant. However, it turns out that this feeling can also result from putting on full combat gear, patrolling a palestinian neighborhood, getting filmed by a foreign press crew, and trying to remember what steps in my life led me to become a possible segment on the evening news in some foreign country i may never visit. 

as i write this i have exactly 10 minutes left before i have to get back in uniform and head back to the army so ill make it quick. no, i wasn't in gaza for the past two weeks, but thanks for everyone's concern, i got a lot of worried emails and facebook messages. i was mostly in the west bank, taking over for soldiers that got sent to gaza. i spent the weekend patrolling a hamas dominated neighborhood in hebron near where the settlers who got kicked out of that big house last month went on a rampage. i saw the house and the graffiti the settlers painted all over the place, it made me sad/angry. while we were on patrol i think my officer got bored (we patrolled for 10 1/2 hours straight) so we started climbing through backyards, going up to rooftops and having impromptu stakeouts. we also did random car searches, which is when this guy and some blonde chick who was either a producer or a reporter started filming us. it felt surreal. the reason for the vigilance was a fear of increased violence because of the operation in gaza, but it turned out to be a mostly quiet weekend, with the noted exception of someone shooting at one of the jeep patrols a couple of kilometers from us. 

ok i really have to run now, i didnt get to write everything i wanted, maybe next week. 

i still have a few weeks of training left. i start jump school in a week, so keep your fingers crossed for my parachute opening. and dont worry, i wont be in gaza in the near future, so thats one news segment you wont have to worry about.