waiting for news...

 today was a weird day. mr smear woke up from a nightmare in the early morning, and his yelling woke me up from my own nightmare, from which i didn't get back to sleep.

one achievement was getting mr smear to agree to post his cartoon from yesterday, and after frustratedly trying a bunch of apps i ended up using gimp to crop it correctly. at least i had gimp.

it took a while, but i managed to get an answer regarding my unemployment, and i've put in a request to the employment office to submit my status to social security like they were supposed to...

i don't remember why i ended up having to rush to get to the office (my employer's office, not my client's), but i arrived *just* in time for a call with an insurance agent. after that, i found a desk and got to work.

it was a very quiet morning, but i did have a chat with a coworker who i learned is on contract with the company i was interviewing with when i signed my contract, which was interesting.

i went to sumsum for lunch, which was an opportunity to have a proper sync with my mom about mr smear's situation and warm up in the sun.

in the afternoon, we had the third session for our AI workflow course, and i was a lot more focused than the previous one. we ended a bit early, which gave me time to get home in time for my phone appointment with mr smear's doctor, who's apparently written me the referrals i asked for.

apparently mr smear had a good day, meaning he didn't get into big trouble.

...

after a long, long time using brave, i've finally reinstalled chrome and copied everything back over. there's so much good about brave, especially the vertical tabs, but i've finally lost patience with not having address history, and the syncing doesn't work as well...

...

aside from a fight with gd over musical tastes (it's a long, decade-old story), the evening was smooth, dinner was good and - oh, yeah. mr smear only went to bed around 9pm because he still had a whole lot of studying to do for his greek history test tomorrow.

oh! mr smear spoke to me in hebrew this evening, entirely of his own volition.

now i'm watching revolution updates from tousi tv and being devastated to have learned tonight that cory doctorow is jewish and has fallen hook, line and sinker for the palestinian genocide lie, and we're praying that we don't need to enter the bomb shelters tonight (or at all) because gd can't breathe down there...

the persian people have to win this. their bravery is incredible.

bondi

 it's the first night of the festival of lights, but we're all heartbroken by the terror attacks on brown university yesterday and bondi beach today.

the intifada has been globalized, for anyone who might have been chanting that slogan...

...

i honestly don't recall if this was this morning's, or yesterday morning's, just-before-waking dream (i *think* it was this morning's):

vacationing up north with my wife, son and mom, fighting roddy piper in an octogon, beating him with his own hammer, in a complicated plan to stay a little longer splitting up from my mom to take a bus home, informing piper's brothers that i'd killed him and them giving me the fight money in small gold coins which kept getting lost all over the place, missing the bus but then remembering that we'd had the car ready to go

i don't know what any of that means. also, i don't think i've heard or thought of the name roddy piper in decades.

mr smear had another rough night last night, which means so did gd. but she seems to be doing a little better today, at least, whereas he's still feverish and coughing a nasty cough.

his teacher sent him get well soon wishes "and a hug", and he informed us, very seriously, that he only hugs family, and maybe a girlfriend *if* he gets a girlfriend 🤣

against my will, i headed out to two pharmacies this morning to pick up gd's forgotten meds and cough drops for mr smear, but that put me in the right place at the right time to deal with a weird message i'd gotten about mr smear's allergist appointment. and it was a good morning for a walk.

the main part of the day was spent keeping up with the bondi attack and messaging our aussie family and friends, but also reading, watching a bit of jujutsu kaisen with mr smear (until we had a blowout over his response to me offering him a banana), and putting a little bit of effort into that algorithm write-up. in the afternoon, i decided to walk to our favorite coffee shop with my kindle, and enjoyed an hour's reading with my family's coughing and hacking replaced by people and traffic noises.

it was nice.

i'm concerned that our treatment of mr smear's ingrown toenails isn't doing much good.

dinner was simple (gd wrapped onigiri leftovers in rice paper for me).

bedtime was smooth, i read some more of the ocean at the end of the lane to mr smear, and realized as i finished the chapter that he'd fallen asleep...

since then the night's been a mash-up of digital housekeeping, the news cycle, balatro... and trying to convince gd (once again) to record her thoughts.

i think i'm going to be going to bed soon.

common ground

 it's been a long ass-day and i'm exhausted, but i'm sure i won't have time to post anything tomorrow so i'm going to jot down what i can before i crash:

i accompanied mr smear to school this morning, then hopped on a bus to the post office to pick up a package for gd.

i was on my way home this morning from dropping my son off at school, it's a beautiful morning and the world feels a whole lot more right than it did just a few days ago.

and then, out of nowhere, my brain started pulling up flashes of trauma from the past two years. not the horrors of october 7th, not the endless sheltering from rocket attacks, not the immeasurable loss of our soldiers, not the endless defending ourselves from all the lies, but the "friends" who turned out to be evil scum. the traitorous jews who think that our enemies would spare them if they promote their evil agenda.

i don't know if there will ever be a reckoning. terrorists, jihadists? we know why they do the evil that they do. but those who support and are complicit in their evil? you're worse human beings than the terrorists. at least they have *some* integrity.

on my way to work i arranged for a technician to come and check out our washing machine, which has been leaking :(

i spent the work day jumping between interesting things, getting some minor stuff done along the way. the biggest and most surprising elements of the day were meeting a bunch of the new people and finding lots of different common grounds.

oh, and i reviewed and discussed the investigation results from our security company, it was satisfactory but we're still going to try to bring it in-house.

for a couple of hours between happy hour and me getting home i felt painfully bloated. but only for a couple of hours. i don't know why.

i rushed out a bit late for my hairdresser's appointment, i ended up five minutes late but it was alright. the haircut itself was good, and i only nodded off a couple of times (i tried really hard not to). the poor guy can barely understand english, never mind hebrew, so our attempts at small talk invariably resulted in him holding up his translation app to record me asking questions or making comments that really weren't important :P

although gd had a really rough day with mr smear and his homework, my experience in the evening was pretty calm. once he was in bed, i sat down to get some work done, which took about an hour and a half. i'm not quite sure what i've been doing for the hour since then, but i'm almost done with my chamomile tea so i guess this is it for now.

...

i'm a teensy bit paranoid because i either cut myself on, or got a splinter from, a hand grip on a bus this morning :/

bonfires

 ah, i remember the conspiracy theory now: trump is burying israel so that he can bring us all in to the US as refugees where we'll rapidly integrate and give them a huge tech and manufacturing advantage.

...

yesterday:

another rough day, much less intense than before but with plenty of intensity left to go around. and lots of surprises / factually incorrect theories that led us down rabbit holes while we were trying to get something urgent (literally) out the door.

i ate too much vegan cake at the happy hour (and forgot to bring the rest home), while a new coworker regaled me with inappropriate tales about his parenting approach during covid. and i shared inappropriate stories with some of my coworkers about the horrible things my son has said to me over the years...

we managed to be "delivery ready" just after 6pm.

as it was lag ba'omer, i tried to find a bonfire but none were reasonably close / guaranteed to include actual bonfires. so instead, i took mr smear for a long, really good walk to the beach, where we had ice cream, and then we had a long, mostly good walk back (minus rushing into a stairwell in a random - but very nice - building when the houthis attacked).

today:

i didn't sleep very well. what made it worse was waking up in the middle of the night to pee, and seeing a notification from threads (which i've tried to opt-out from) for a particularly nasty and libellous antisemitic claim. it took me a while to calm down after that.

the morning started off pretty shit, with another fight with mr smear about screentime even though he's been punished with no screentime. that got ugly.

then i put in some work hours, figuring something out and then fixing a different thing, and then i took mr smear out for a walk. we went to the museum, where we saw some really interesting stuff which triggered some very big feelings (motherland), and although he needed some "herding" he came to the party and we left the museum with a good vibe.

the next part of our walk went really badly, but after he understood what the dynamics needed to be (i can't believe this is what we're doing these days) we made some good progress. our walk continued to the mall, where we had falafel for lunch and picked up two heavy bags of muesli which he carried most of the way home.

on the way home, we passed the war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness monument, and appreciated its structure.

i was really tired when we got home, but before i could nap i had to have a massive fight with my wife over trust issues, and i'm extremely grateful that in spite of all the feelings i managed to express myself well enough that it was resolved in a really positive way.

i did some more work in the afternoon, i managed to make some progress but nothing satisfying, and now the sun's about to set and we're about to make kiddush.

shabbat shalom

the stress ball

yesterday began positively, and so far the post-privileges world is looking pretty good.

when my mother informed me last night that mr smear had reported that he'd lost his privileges forever, i was reminded that on the way to school, we'd seen a child dressed up in a costume and mr smear had asked me how long until halloween.

now, please bear in mind that my son has absolutely no concept of time, and asking him what day it is is usually a silly waste of breath, but also that on our way home on saturday i'd told him that he'd remember the 10th of may as "the last time [he] fucked with me". so when i asked him what day it was, he didn't hesitate to say "11th of may" and it took everything i had to not laugh out loud and continue with "and what month is halloween?" 🤣

the past two work days have been hard, but yesterday was the harder of the two. it was almost exclusively about planning and preparing installations, although it also included entertaining nystire for a bit, reminiscing about our late coworker with our security officer (who's also mourning, but is outsourced so hasn't been doing so as part of the organization), and interviewing a very interesting candidate (i marked him as "strong hire" when i should have marked "proceed", but there's nothing i can do and it's probably fine).

those distractions notwithstanding, it was 7.30pm when we finally had a release candidate that had been sufficiently tested to begin the first installation, and we then found ourselves doing it on unfamiliar hardware and with a very clear and unrealistic looming deadline.

i found myself alone, nursing a beer (my meal replacement) and running into the weirdest issues, until at 10.15pm i realized that i'd been battling for over an hour with a VPN misconfiguration thinking that i was having network issues - that was when i finally left the office and came home; not physically tired, but emotionally completely done.

oh, and my back having been in a spasm for most of the day didn't help much either.

...

i finally posted the following yesterday evening, which i'd been thinking about since being painfully disappointed by a post from tpj a few days ago:

a few days ago an officer that i served with, who lives in a country with some of the most toxic, antisemitic media in the world (the BBC), wrote a post describing israel as an "occupation" and our army as guilty of war crimes. such counterfactual propaganda is painful enough when other people repeat it, but it's led to me recognize that the old adage about the greatest evil being the indifference of good men needs to be revised:

the greatest evil is the amplification of evil by people who we expect to know better. 

in retrospect, our lives since october 7th have been completely overtaken by a perpetual sense of mourning. we mourn the victims of the massacre itself, and all of the traumas both personal and national that the massacre has left behind. we mourn the hostages even as we hope against hope that some of them might return, and we mourn the horrors that they've endured and continue to endure. we mourn the hopes that we've held for so long that peace was somehow just around the corner, and we mourn the decades that we spent deluding ourselves that the situation was so much simpler and less demonic than it is.

but most of all we mourn the illusion that this modern, 21st century, hi-tech world was somehow better than before, that truth and justice were shared values, that antisemitism was fringe, that the west wasn't at war with innumerable enemies who work tirelessly in underhanded ways to turn democracies against themselves. and we mourn each and every friend, relative and supposed ally who falls into the sophisticated propaganda traps and turns their back on us. even more so the jews who don't realize that they're not only unwittingly betraying us over here, but themselves, and every jew everywhere, before us and after us.

perpetual mourning and grief are hard, exhausting pills to swallow.

...

it wasn't an easy night, but at least the massage time in the morning made a big difference. i dropped mr smear off at school, then headed to a post point to collect some ali express gear for gd. i arrived half an hour before opening time, so i hunted around for a coffee shop and settled down with a vegan coffee slushie.

life was good - for all of three seconds, before my phone rang with a video call from a coworker and an unfamiliar name in desperate need of assistance because one of our systems died.

the unpleasantness continued all the way to the office, with only a few minutes' pause as i picked up the package, and for the most part i didn't feel like much of a contributor (although i quietly celebrated a moment when something i'd suggested did help).

i went straight from that to troubleshooting my own installation, which needed to be done before with could continue with any others, with a bunch of different people breathing down my neck...

ultimately, i figured out what we needed to do, delegated some annoying manual labor to the project lead, and between the two of us we managed to get (almost) everything ready by the end of the day.

which is the point at which we were informed that there would be a delay in delivery, but thank you for the effort 🙄

no matter, it's been one heck of a learning experience for the organization, so i'm good with it. i came home relatively early, we all had a very pleasant evening (and watched the first episode of the original naruto series), i've had some time to myself (including playing slay the spire), and although it's late i'm going to at least spend a little time thinking about some of tomorrow's work before hitting the massager and going to bed.

...

the bitcoin money finally landed in our bank account today, and it was enough to cover the last outstanding debt we owed to my mom. this is a very special moment for us ^_^

the rollercoaster intensified

 thursday:

thursday started off well, and i'm pleased to say that mr smear received another glowing report in the afternoon about how well he behaved!

confirmed: it's not that he can't cooperate and get the job done. it's that he lacks the proper motivation. you don't need to medicate a child and potentially handicap them into order to get them to comply. speaking of which, i think chatgpt was lying to me when it said it would process the PDF i uploaded and get back to me, but in the meanwhile, i got it to translate chapter by chapter and compiled it myself.

so i just checked in with the PDF production:

omg, chatgpt is even worse than a real human! 🤣

work was alright, it was harder to implement my boss's feedback than i'd anticipated but i'd made good headway by the time i left. along the way, we had a frontend emergency in production and it was really nice to be able to figure it out and fix it quickly.

i was disappointed to learn that the art school we want to enroll mr smear in is in such high demand that it works on a lottery system, so even if he does everything perfectly he might still not be able to get in...

yesterday:

waking up to news of the pogrom in amsterdam. and the horrific online shit-show that followed. of course the jihadists can justify it. of course. of course the police didn't intervene. of course.

our enemies have always liked to compare us to vermin. we're the one "protected group" that the woke don't care to protect.

just a head's up though: when us "rats" start fleeing, it means your ship is sinking.

gd's been taking things really, really hard.

otherwise, it was a quiet day, continuously punctuated by that anxiety.

i woke up from the following dream: i left my bag on a train after a post-lecture lecture in which everyone around me couldn't see me, only gd in a swimsuit instead.

panicked about losing my computer, i tried to understand what to do while whoever had it easily unlocked it and was messing with my company. i got a call from a threatening encoded voice but it didn't say anything helpful, i called my boss, and he told me he'd been receiving the same calls. 

i tried to brush my teeth in an outside sink but this homeless-looking mime wanted toothpaste. he did something weird with the toothpaste and i got angry with him, as in a almost clocked him, and gd got between us to stop me from getting into trouble.

all of a sudden he stopped his performance and took me to show me that he'd somehow managed to retrieve my computer. i helplessly and humbly expressed my gratitude, and asked him, incredulously, "how?!"

he took me to a secret spot on the hill about the square, dug up and opened a container, introducing me to a giant flea that he appeared to regard as a pet.

we had some drama when picking up mr smear from school because we thought he'd lost his pencil case - that would be the second time in a few months, and it's a really expensive thing to replace - but it was a huge relief to discover that his teacher had found it and put it in his locker...

we did some cleaning in the afternoon. at some point, mr smear cut up a mango by himself for the very first time. also, i soaked some dried pineapple (unsweetend) in lemon juice and it was a surprisingly good experience.

sailor came over for dinner. it was an enjoyable evening, we ate too much and it was great, and we even had coffee afterwards, in part because i didn't want to fall asleep too early, again.

but i totally fell asleep too early, again. not even the caffeine could stop it.

today so far:

we all slept in this morning, and it's a beautiful, beautiful day so far. mr smear's still snotty and coughing, i think we're going to take it pretty easy on ourselves after such an insane week.

in the middle of the night

 it's 4am. i've spent half the night tossing and turning, mostly responding to a message from a friend about whether or not canada is dangerous for jews. i don't know how dangerous it is right now if you don't openly identify, but i do know that gd and i both know people who've gone off the rails on pro-hamas / antisemitic propaganda, we have friends and family who either don't feel it's safe, or have cut off communication. did we make the right decision to stay? we didn't really have many options. financially, we definitely wouldn't have managed... 

also, i've been physically uncomfortable and restless. so i got up a while ago, and have been doomscrolling social media.

now i've responded to that message, and am left just feeling sleepless and sad.

*sigh*

the world at war

the war on the west is in full swing. i participated in a psyops webinar on thursday evening, and it was horrifying to have all the pieces of the puzzle come together to draw a picture of what we are - and have been for decades - actually up against. it's a massive, coordinated campaign not just against israel, but against the west in general, and it's far more insidious than quatar funding western universities.

it's the BRICS countries working together, specifically iran, russian and china, to subvert western values and ideologies. it's the tools they're using - students, social media, and filling roles in western institutions with ideologues (like the UN, and the ICJ). the noise from the past week or two in the news is directly due to this.

it's distressing, mostly because it's hard to come up with ways to combat it. the speaker was quite pessimistic, and i personally can't abide by that.

...

thursday:

a pretty good morning, feeling less stuffy/allergic (i'm still not 100%, but i'm not feeling sick at all)

frontend magic, but with some concerning findings. leaving work with less enthusiasm following an argument with the boss

the psyops webinar, and all the while working towards proving my boss wrong (and, in my opinion, succeeding)

friday:

after three days of sticking to the fasting regimen, i broke and had breakfast early...

comics shopping, learning (again) not to ask mr smear his opinion. we picked up the second bone volume in hebrew, a miles morales comic in hebrew (although it doesn't have nikud), and הילד הכחל, which so far seems to be a winner.

picking up vegan cholent, being proved wrong about the plastic bag leaking but fortunately not losing any clothing over it.

intervening to prevent a fight on the bus (gd called out a woman with tacky facial tattoos for being rough with her dog, who in turn responded with a curse)

forgetting i was on-call, fortunately the incident that occurred wasn't too severe. spending a couple of hours investigating and putting together a runbook, but ultimately my boss had a few additional tricks up his sleeve that were needed.

joining a pre-shabbat call on antisemitism that turned out to be not very interesting, particularly after the previous psyops talk

watching the rest of ice age 5 (i've skipped a few). at this point, the characters are clearly a vehicle for a story that doesn't have anything to do with them or their world. it's a fun movie if you watch it fore-armed with the knowledge that it's just an animated series of irreverant and random jarring or subtley (sometimes not-so-subtley) age-inappropriate gags that doesn't care about making sense.

reporting a neighbor's dog stuck on the balcony

passing out quickly on the couch

a better day

 the bug from the sunday continued to drive me crazy until the early afternoon, when my boss told me to just do what the AWS representative advised. i didn't think it was the right thing to do, and i expressed my opinions, but i began implementing it as instructed.

just one last test.

fortunately, my tests were pretty solid and i finally had some real data to work with - and i discovered that the "fix" suggested by the professional would have opened a massive security hole! while i struggled to wrap my head around what was actually happening, i managed to find a solution that appears to be not only viable, but correct, and i'm now waiting to see the proof in the puddingproduction environment.

i was more shocked by how backwards the AWS implementation is than relieved that i've found a solution...

...

on sunday night, i scratched my head a bit, and a bit of my head came off. last night a dermatologist called me back and advised that i go see someone in person. gd (and dr google) think i may have developed psoriasis. i hope it's not psoriasis :(

mr smear had a much better day yesterday. the day started off awkwardly because we were both invited to talk with the school councillor; mr smear was in trouble for skipping classes on sunday (when we were having a tough morning), and i was in trouble for not warning his teacher that he was having a tough morning. gd managed to get him to his hebrew tutor and through his homework.

so: winning.

on sunday morning, i managed to install the ceiling attachment points for the shower curtain rail, but i accidentally pushed one of the screws through the ceiling and needed to wait 24 hours for the "putty" i used to fix it to dry. yesterday, when it was ready, i finally set about putting up the curtain rail... only to discover that in the month or two since i bought the damned thing and haven't been able to put it up, some of the parts went missing.

#$@!.

so now we have to wait for a handyman to swing by and see if he can help us out.

gd's really having a hard time psychologically, primarily with the war and the international response to it, on top of her daily struggle with pain which seems to have gotten worse since she's been coughing so much in the weeks we've been dealing with covid.

my mom managed to track down a couple of copies of the hebrew workbooks we had when i was a kid! it's been so long that apparently on one or two teachers even remembered the name (מדרגות or madregot), and i'm hoping that the song i still have stuck in my head is in one of them.

יש לי אח גדול

בן עשרים אולי

הוא יכול לעשות הכל

וקוראים לו שי

שי חייל והוא גיבור

אמא נורא דואגת

right, it's time to get moving.

troll tool

jesus, the exhaustion. the distraction. the demoralization.

work has been particularly shit the last couple of weeks, i've been working on stuff that i really don't care about and that every part makes less sense than the last. everything is broken, or not yet implemented, or not planned to be implemented, and it feels like everything i touch was just an ancient, mummified piece of shit that was just waiting for the slightest encouragement to collapse into a fecal dust cloud.

the internet has been particularly toxic over the last month, and on top of worrying about the hostages, and our soldiers, and the victims, and all the people who've been relocated away from the borders, and our own safety... it's very taxing. it's frightening how many "useful idiots" hamas has in its pocket, worse still when those useful idiots are celebrities with large followings or worse - jews.

arguing facts with people is just insane.

meanwhile, today i heard an interesting podcast episode that inspires a little hope in the potential for a saner future: neil lazarus talking to a west bank palestinian.

friday:

gd's jewelery part ii. mr smear and i accompanied her this time, and we ended up having a very nice morning out. we also discovered that the shoe store we saw adult galshoes in - katalina - is completely vegan! and full of cool stuff.

on the way home, we stopped at a supermarket to pick up a couple of things, and just as we finished paying the sirens went off. it turned out to be a good place to get caught in a rocket attack, and good timing, because we just walked through to the back and i enjoyed the baguette we'd bought.

saturday:

by the afternoon, i knew we needed to do something outside. i took mr smear for quite a walkabout, stopping in at dizengoff center to see what card tournaments were taking place (he wasn't too interested, and there was the distinct smell of unwashed teenagers), running into drone hacker on the way back and enjoying a chat, then at mr smear's direction picking up a big, healthy lunch at cafe easy that he just wolfed down. it was a good saturday afternoon experience.

by saturday night, we were freaking out about the smell from the airconditioner. i "did some research", and some of the results scared me, but one forum post include a report that leaving their airconditioner running for 24 hours on the highest fan speed had cleared the smell. i turned ours on on the highest speed, and prayed.

yesterday: 

i dropped mr smear off at school, then walked to the clinic and hospital and got a bunch of things sorted out.

because a frustrating workday wasn't bad enough, there had to be some bad news from sea point. a cousin of mine was on the scene, and it took place right across the road from my mom's apartment. on the one hand, i'm glad the police actually took action, but on the other... these people are mad, and rabidly antisemitic, and their government as a whole is cool with that.

we had a parents webinar around bedtime. insight: a talk from a psychologist who discussed how we process trauma and normalize bad situations. disappointment: while most of the parents are welcoming the 70-or-so kids rescued from the "gaza envelope", a couple were bizarrely and selfishly concerned about their children experiencing second-hand trauma by being exposed to kids who almost lost their lives mere weeks ago. jesus, fuck.

by last night, the smell from the airconditioner seemed to have disappeared, but i wasn't 100% confident so we left it running another night.

today:

by this morning we were convinced that the smell was gone, and turned the airconditioner off. i just tested it out a short while ago, and it seems to be good!

the day began with one downer - mr smear not feeling well - and one thing that got me majorly pissed off: our grocery store order from the day before hadn't arrived. then, after calling them for help and being put on hold by a representative for five minutes, the call was disconnected. then, i had to wait on hold for another fifteen minutes to get to another representative, by which stage i was livid. fortunately, the second representative was legitimately helpful. i'd been angry enough to look up taking them to small claims court, but not quite angry enough to want to put myself through such an admin-heavy process.

while doing the dishes this morning, i caught up with all of tom shapira's (hebrew) podcast about comics called the between-panels's podcast, and i warmly recommend it - fascinating stuff!

i might be very wrong, of course, but gd seems to be doing a lot better. she went out again today by herself.

mr smear's demonstrating a lot of behavior improvement. we had a moment today that traditionally would have become a nasty scene - he was supposed to be on a screen break, i left the room for a few minutes and when i came back i caught his red-handed - but the tension dissapated very quickly and a few minutes later he apologized. and that was the whole damned story. the rest of the day was pretty much good vibes.

aside from another rocket attack just before bedtime, but he's totally into bacterial takeover and big numbers now :P

i was so tired after putting him to bed that i crashed myself, then woke up a while later and was unable to sleep because i needed to a) get all this down and b) respond to people who are wrong on the internet.

god help us all.

mon-tues

difficult work days, and everything's a long, unpleasant slog made more unpleasant by the fact that i'm not interested, made far more unpleasant by the raging ignorance and rabid antisemitism floating around on all fronts. i don't think i've ever been this distracted in my life.

there've been less rocket attacks the past few days, but they seem to be getting more hardcore. less warning and more and louder explosions.

gd seems to be a little calmer, though still far from calm. we spent a good chunk of today cleaning the airconditioners in preparation for tomorrow's visit by the repairman, and it looks like she's hurt herself again.

i should have insisted on her not helping me.

i think we did a good job, but the grossness runs deep.

i suggested that mr smear give the stanley parable a try today, he was giggling hysterically for ages as he mercilessly trolled the narrator.

gd had spent the morning talking to a friend who's suicidal, and between that and something mr smear said (in jest) i was inspired to take him aside and discuss saturday's revelation about how life is just like a rogue-like video game, bringing it all together with the book i made for him. it was a good talk.

his math skills are progressing with prodigy, having a dashboard is awesome.

his reading skills are improving thanks to bone.

wtf wodan and thor days

 it is the end of thursday, the beginning of the weekend, and i'm pretty sure my thursday - from a work perspective - was an almost complete waste of time.

wednesday? wtf was wednesday? i was still struggling with the extreme exhaustion. otherwise, i don't remember much but i did actually get my main task accomplished. and we had a couple of rocket attacks.

...

on the one hand, things for us seem to be normalizing even though the entire country, the entire world is being plunged into madness. on the other, it's difficult not to read the news / social media and realize that the real world is suddenly much scarier and much more bizarre than it should be.

i'm scared for jews all over the world, in particular in south africa right now when the kids at the jewish school now have to hide their identities (incl. not wearing uniforms) for their security. and the stories coming out of the top western universities are extremely discouraging.

...

oh! yes. and something made me realize that i hadn't spoken to scrapper since the war broke out, so i messaged him and discovered that he just happened to be in israel and getting off at our train station. so he came in for a surprise visit (and a berating over not having told us he was here), while a lot of the subject matter was unhappy it was good to see him.

thursday? feeling much better, though still very tired and consistently unmotivated. i dropped mr smear off at school, paid a quick visit to the clinic to sort out some admin,

gd seems to be doing better.

mr smear was mostly fine, until we had an incident this afternoon. on the one hand, it was something ridiculous that i could have just let go of, but on the other - he was being extremely rude, far beyond the line, and we had to establish the boundary. things got heated and emotional, but i managed to pull him back (even while he was still angry) and after some time on his own he came out and everything was good.

i feel really bad for him, but in spite of how outrageously insane he can be i'm relieved that he's developing the ability to re-center. i also feel like i'm levelling up in how i handle these things. far from perfect, but definitely improving.

...

i've been playing a lot of inscryption. it's addictive, it's fun, it's infuriating. and according to scrapper's spoiler, the bit i'm struggling to get through that feels like it's closing in on the end of the game, is only just the beginning. that's insane.

flat

it is now (technically) wednesday. 

monday and tuesday: pure exhaustion, what feels like a solid combination of physical and emotional. a few rocket attacks, for some reason sounding a lot more aggressive - more rockets, louder. gd's still recovering so she can't go down to the bomb shelter, so it's me and mr smear downstairs while hoping that gd's safe enough in the stairwell.

at least she's got some company - our much older neighbor can't scramble downstairs very well either.

work has been frustrating, but whatever. mr smear's been a mixed bag in terms of behavior, but yesterday he went to a friend who lives close by and apparently he was just fine.

i've barely been getting anything done these days. i know i shouldn't be too hard on myself, but goddamn - i've got it relatively easy and i don't feel like i'm coping particularly well.

i guess two of the biggest sanity-restorers at the moment are inscryption and a family rewatch of hunter x hunter. also, mr smear reading pages from a hebrew-english dictionary the other day to avoid the homework i assigned him (he's really got to improve his reading), and today successfully reading two pages of the hebrew translation of bone: out from boneville which doesn't have nikud (vowels, kind of) and sports a non-trivial font.

prodigy's math game is also going well; we did have a moment the other day where he decided that it wasn't fair that it was forcing him to battle all the time, and i explained to him that most wars are between people who want to fight and people who don't want to fight, just like hamas and israel... war and rocket attacks give a kid a different perspective.

when we came up from the shelter two days ago he was very grateful to find his mother still alive.

dst/procedure day

the political situation - specifically the global rise in explicit antisemitism - is getting scary.

it's been a long day. i slept poorly last night (in spite of staying up late and playing some more inscryption, which i've done tonight too), and got up this morning to daylight savings time and a long and generally unsatisfying work day.

mr smear and i accompanied gd to her nerve block this evening, which took much less time than usual, and so far we haven't had any rocket attacks today (although we've heard the explosions from neighboring areas), which for us at least is a blessing.

i've got so many things to do that i'm not getting anything done.

all over the place in the rains

(rains of water and rockets)

 i had a whole lot of urgent and important things to do today, but instead i wasted a good couple of hours running around trying to get security keys cut for our bomb shelter, with zero success. although the second mission did teach me a lesson - not to buy falafel from our "usual" place any more - and not to leave the house in closed shoes without an umbrella. i got caught in a massive downpour, and hid out in a coffee shop that shut its doors right in the middle of it :/

my first day of my last on-call was okay, i guess. the collaborative part went well. it was weird constantly missing the CTO who's (apparently) been trying to speak to me since i handed in my notice.

my employer sent a lego set for mr smear, he was really excited - that was awesome ^_^

gd says we were in the shelter four times today, but i'd lost track by the time she said it. one foot in front of the other. we were interrupted by the siren in the middle of dinner, and mr smear was visibly panicked - that broke my heart. even so, he enjoys going down to the shelter because i let him play games on my phone. that doesn't help when we're - for the second night in a row - interrupted while i'm reading to him in bed... $#@!

i'm also finding it very difficult to balance getting him to do things quickly and efficiently in case there's an attack, and not making him paranoid that there's going to be an attack any minute. this shit is hard.

gd's had two offers from very generous and concerned friends to help us get to montreal. she also managed to get in touch with the canadian authorities responsible for airlifting citizens out of the country. (not very far, but whatever). she hasn't been able to decide whether to actually go or not, though, and it's proving a tough call for her. i've told that i'm happy with whatever she chooses, and i really don't think that us being separated for a short while is too big a deal.

...

a while ago we watched j'accuse!, an incredible documentary about the efforts of my (half) sister's cousin (from the other half) and the granddaughter of one of the villains to get some kind of justice for some of the most brutal massacres my people (both sides of my family came escaped lithuania) have ever suffered. the description of what was done to us then by the lithuanians (before the nazis even arrived) was absolutely shocking. when trying to compare the pogrom of the 7th of october to anything, i find that comparisons to 9/11 just don't cut it, because they don't take into account the personal, vile, evil, perverse and brutal nature of the attacks. the lithuanian massacres, though? that's it. that's the comparison.

we've been persecuted before, we'll be persecuted again. we promised ourselves after the holocaust "never again". well, here we are. "again". the only difference is that this time we're not taking it lying down.

...

i just spoke to my mom for a while, and i'm concerned that south africa's become even more dangerous for jews than it was before - i mean, the whole world just exploded with antisemitism, but in south africa the goddamned president himself is in on it. i made my mother promise me that if things take a turn for the worse, she's to remember that i told her that i'd rather worry about the money to bring her and help than to lose her.

it's exactly what i've been saying the whole time, but i think the current situation is beginning to drive home just how dangerous south africa is.

trauma

 i have plenty to say, but no way to say it. certainly not right now, it's been a... a... i don't know how to describe how this week has been.

firstly, i'm traumatized by everything i've seen and heard and so is everyone else. we're reeling, we're grieving, we're praying for the victims and the hostages and their families and our troops, and we're grateful that at least some of the world has now woken up to the reality we've been facing alone for a very, very long time.

secondly, i'm anxious about all those people here and around the world who think that what hamas has done is justified. or - and this is just as bad in my book - have convinced themselves after twenty years of believing fake images and videos produced by pallywood to make israelis seem evil, that the live-streamed images from hamas themselves on saturday were somehow faked.

holy shit.

jews around the world are scared because of what's happening here, and because of the immediate increase in antisemitic activity that's followed this demonic attack. here we've had to deal with the massive loss of life on our borders, and rocket attacks, and the threat of even more punishment from the other arab nations.

...

at the same time, half of us are fighting, and half of us are holding the fort, supporting the troops and the hospitals, and keeping the businesses running, all while trying to make sense of things and all with our kids at home. everyone's just putting one foot in front of the other, and praying that our military manages to achieve all of its objectives in as close to one piece as possible.

...

the work week was difficult on two fronts: the work itself was unpleasant, and working while being perpetually distracted by the situation, by rocket attacks, by fear and anxiety was just awful. to make matters worse, i handed in my resignation two days before the attacks, and i still haven't had a chance to discuss things like announcing my leaving with my bosses.

never mind worrying about what switching jobs while everything is upside is going to look like...

one moment at a time.

...

mr smear has been a real trooper. he's been pretty calm for the most part, he's asked some very intelligent questions about what's going on and why but also allowed for me to get away with "i'll explain that part when you're older" on the aspects that require a little more nuance and maturity.

we have had a couple of negative incidents, one of which was so bad that he sat outside refusing to budge and informed us that he'd be fine with getting hit by a missile :/

ironically, there was a rocket attack about a minute after we finally got him to move, and we just made it into a nearby shelter in time. he has since described his experience in there as "a living nightmare", because the room we were in "was filled to the brim with dead cockroaches". there were two dead cockroaches, but so far it seems like that's been the worst thing he's had to deal with :P

he had his first meeting with the new therapist, but it was over zoom. his class has been meeting regularly on zoom, today they actually had a math class.

we needed to go to the mall this morning, and i walked into a book store looking for activity books. mr smear found the english books and picked up diary of a wimpy kid, and he was so engrossed in reading it that i had to tear it out of his hands in order to pay for it. he devoured that book today, he was done before the sun set and that's taking into account the hour or two that he watched a movie and did chores. i'm stunned.

...

gd's been really struggling with anxiety and panic, she's never seen any kind of fighting and she's terrified of what would happen if the terrorists reached us. she's now considering taking mr smear and going to canada until the situation calms down, but that's an extremely costly and complicated enterprise and i don't believe it's necessary. with everything that's happened, i'm very confident in our armed forces. i'm also confident that once this war is over, our political scene is going to change dramatically for the better.

one thing i know for sure is that it's 2023 and the thousands of years of persecution we've suffered are still far from over. we need israel now more than ever.

we will win.

we have to win.

holocaust memorial day 2018

i'm fascinated by some of the stuff in my feed from holocaust memorial day - posts claiming that the holocaust wasn't a unique historical event, and posts claiming that we should focus on the other victims as well.

1. never in history has a people been so brutally destroyed on such a massive scale, under such inhumane conditions and with such inhumane efficiency. to claim anything else is to claim ignorance of what actually happened, and i warmly recommend locating a holocaust museum close to you and paying it a visit.

2. yes, there were most certainly other victims of the holocaust. absolutely. but there were six million of us, and as the prime target of the holocaust we're allowed to take one day of the year to remind ourselves and others just how far antisemitism goes - yesterday, today, and tomorrow. that's not to say that the other groups of people who suffered shouldn't be remembered, or aren't welcome to join us in remembering, but i think it's fair to say that they were swept up in something that was created exclusively with us in mind.

---one "friend" actually blocked me for responding to his post about how the holocaust wasn't special, when my response was an explanation about what made the holocaust unique, how an act of genocide demands the complete dehumanization of the enemy and is not the same as violent subjugation. slavery is awful, yes, and lots of people have suffered and died tragically as slaves, but slaves are still seen as having some value to their owners. jews were seen as vermin, not "less than human" but utterly devoid of humanity.

NEVER FORGET.
it was ordinary humans who built and ran the death camps. people like you and me.