Strangely Unaffected

Vin Diesel will be playing Number 47 in an upcoming movie.

I went out with a very good friend (which I'll call E from now now) and a female friend from the university (which I'll call L from now on) yesterday. I'll write a bit about that later, but now I have a weird dream that I need to get off my chest.

We were driving, and L said "Hey, why don't we play the game of immigrant worker or prostitute?" I jokingly said, in a dumb voice "How do you play that game?" (I think this actually happened last night, but it's so difficult telling apart the dreams from reality sometimes). We were driving around places likely to have prostitutes and immigrant workers, and began to play. E and I started calling out "prostitute" or "immigrant worker" whenever we saw someone.

After a while, and for no reason I can find, we were walking inside a brother of some sort. (I think L wasn't with us at that time, although in my dream we didn't drop her off at her house. I guess this dream only has the highlight, although the editing is a bit lacking.) E and I entered a room that had two rather small beds, which were against opposing walls. This looked weird so we went out of it. I don't remember if we went into that room again by ourselves or if we found the guy who runs the place and he escorted us inside with three girls.

E chose a girl and she started getting ready. She gave E what looked like a small container of lubricant, but was actually some kind of candy. I looked from one girl to the other trying to see who I'd like. One was quite fat and had a tattoo on the upper part of her left tit in the shape of a circle. I don't remember the other one. The girl E chose and the fat one were talking about how the MP3 player they had was supposed to be easy to reach. The girl E chose demonstrated that the MP3 player she had (which looked just like the MP3 player my dad got for my brother a little while ago) was strapped to her hip and was easy to operate. She pressed play and even though she only had headphones connected to it we heard music.

When this was happening E started talking to the owner and told him "We were in a place near Azrielli (which is a big building in Tel Aviv) and it looked much better. This place looks really seedy, and the beds are really small." The owner said something irrelevent about the size of the tables or something, and that's when I woke up.

I'm sorry buddy. Sometimes you get the good dreams, and sometimes you get the weird fucked up dreams.

I had quite a few weird dreams when we were going out more. We both were working, and E's ex wasn't quite a downer as she became later on. I remember calling this kind of dream "Vodka Dreams", even though I didn't always drink vodka. I thought about creating a webcomic and calling it that, but there's still the problem of me not being able to draw good enough.

For the past few days I've been waking up at about 5-6am and have a difficut time getting back to sleep. It doesn't matter whether I go to bad at 11pm (although that was only once in the past two weeks) or at 3am and later. I wake up, feeling tired as hell, but can't go back to sleep for a while. I usually manage to fall asleep again and sleep until 11am or so, but today I couldn't even sleep past 9am. Since I'm doing absolutely nothing, I'd rather sleep than be awake.

I need this war to end so I can go back to the dorms and study. I have too much to do to just sit around the house and play a game that's older than my brother. Not that this prevents this piece of shit computer from getting stuck all the time, but at least I don't invest too much time into the game before it crashes.

He doesn't deserve this. I'm not saying this because he's my friend, but because it's true. You invest so much into a relationship, and you deserve better. I'm not saying relationships shouldn't end, but not like that. There was no warning, no deterioration of the relationship. Just a simple "this is not working".

I think I'm all talked out about this, though. I don't have any weird dreams like I had after he broke up with his previous girlfriend. This thing never happens when you have something going right, and at the moment he's after taking a break from his job and being constantly angry at his family (although that's pretty much a constant).

It's a vicious cycle. When you're down, your girlfriend breaks up with you. When she breaks up with you, you're feeling even worse and need a girlfriend to help you. When you're down you can't gather enough strength to go out and suffer through the bullshit of girls. Girls in Israel have the very stupid mentality of "get married and start a family as soon as you possibly can", so you can't just casually date women over 22 or so. On the other hand, you can't date little girls either, because they're too immature. His ex wasn't even 21, and they've been dating for over a year now. He was her first serious relationship, so she doesn't really know how difficult it is to find someone who's as good to her as he was. She'll find out eventually, but it'll be too late, for the both of them.

The best thing to do after a horrible breakup is to remove traces of your ex from your life. The trouble is that his ex has been a significant influence on his life for the past year or so. She affected the kinds of music he listens to, there's a poster in her room that she got him, he even started learning 3D graphics to make her a birthday present. I need to be there for him, but it seems like now the university is going to resume work, which means that I'll have to go back there and finish the papers. Great timing, isn't it? When it rains, it pours.

I know it's wrong for me to wish bad on someone, but she needs to break first. She needs to be the one to write a sad entry on her blog first. She needs to be the one sending an SMS message saying something. It's not being mean, it's logical. When you finish a relationship, you need to be aware of the consequences, and you need to be the one agonizing over it.

So Israel is in a war right now. It's funny, because I don't remember any declaration of war. Oh, that's right, terrorist groups don't declare war, they just attack civilians. Silly me, how could I forget it?

I went back home on Thursday last week, not because of the situation, but because I desperately needed to get the fuck away from that place and those people. I needed to talk to people who understand me, and this is where my friends are. When I got home my mom told me that the Hizbollah fanatic murderers launched a rocket and hit Haifa. Israel is a very small place, and the base where I did basic training is the same one where a group of Israeli-Arabs broke into and killed several soldiers. Naturally I didn't tell this to my mother until after I finished basic training. But this? This is too close to home. I pride myself on not being too serious and not worrying too much, but this got me spooked. My mom called me earlier asking me not to go back to Haifa today, and my dad told me that they stopped the trains there. I'll stay home. There's no point in taking undue risks. I'll wait it out for a day or two. Maybe I'll be able to get something done here after all.

I'm going to call my grandmothers to tell them I'm ok. They shouldn't have to worry. Everyone else can call my cell phone. I just need to be near it, or they'll think something happened. I guess I'll have to take it with me to the bathroom from now on... ;-)

I think this expression is used to indicate that the number has decreased, but in my case it's the opposite. The last roommate arrived two days ago, thus making the apartment fully occupied. *sigh* I need to finish my papers as soon as fucking possible. I kinda wonder how they'll manage without my plates and utensils.

The roommates annoyed me yesterday, which made me dip into my Vodka in the Freezer™. It's not something they did. In fact, it's the exact opposite. They didn't wash the dishes. I wanted to make an omellet, but the good pan (mine) still had a bit of food in it. I looked at the other two pans we have, tried to clean them both (without success), and started making the omellet. Unfortunately, there was some sort of burned stuff stuck to the pan, and although it wouldn't peel off when I tried to clean it, it certainly managed to do that when I cooked. I had to throw everything away and find something else to eat.

I got 93 and 88 on the tests I took on Wednesday two weeks ago and Monday last week, respectively. The 93 isn't actually a 93, because the teacher raised the grades to everyone in the class because we all failed a certain part of the test. I went and saw that pretty much everything that I wasn't sure of during the test is exactly where I got the wrong answers. I think I could raise the grade to 94, but it just seems like a waste of time. I mean, not only is 93 a really good grade, it's the highest in the class. When I looked at the other test I felt so stupid. I got so confused with something, and did it several times, but the answer I chose before was the correct one, and I changed from it. The other two questions that I got wrong were so stupid too. A part of me wants to take the test again, but then I risk getting a lower grade, and the teacher also said that he might give a few extra points to people who contribute to the discussions in class, and I think I might get a few points. I want to ask him, but I think that sounds a bit rude. "Hi Doctor Moore, I was wondering, are you going to give me some extra points in your class, or should I just do the test again?" Doesn't seem right.

For some reason there are a lot of low flying planes flying overhead. Maybe they're firefighting planes and there's a forest fire? Internet don't fail me now...
Yep. Forest fire. Somewhere near here. Now I wonder whether I'm smelling cigarette smoke or burning tree smoke. Oh well. If it gets too bad they'll evacuate the dorms like they did last year. Thankfully I wasn't here at the time.

That reminds me that I read yesterday or the day before that the cause of a fire was because someone who was travelling shat in the woods and burned the toilet paper. And god knows how many acres of land at the same time. Idiot. It's fucking toilet paper. It's biodegradable.

I found a great new music service called Pandora. It's really great, because for some reason Live365 doesn't want to install itself on my computer anymore (even though it was installed just a while ago and working fine). They claim that the minimum requirements are Windows 2000 or XP, 1GHz processor and 256MB of RAM. I've got a Pentium 2 350MHz, 128MB of RAM, and Windows 98SE. Sure, if I try to run anything else at the time the computer locks up, but it's a good thing that I didn't bother reading that stuff before. Also, because of their licensing agreements they can only provide this service to US citizens. The way they verify it? Enter your zip code. That's a great security plan, guys. I mean, it's not like you can just write something and pretend it's your zip code, right? I mean, nobody knows that 90210 isn't just the name of the show, it's also the zip code, right? Idiots. Still, their stupidity is my gain.

One of the people who's supposed to work with me on a paper called me today. I was quite surprised, because I thought I'll just do the whole damn paper alone. I don't mind, really. I think I prefer to do it alone than rely on somebody else. Still, this way I can let him deal with some of the more annoying aspects of the paper.

... If it's the last thing I'll ever do...

I've been arguing with one of my roommates far too much recently. I think I called him Childish McAnnoying before, but I'm not sure. Anyway, we've had two large arguments today, about nothing. The first one was some stupidity regarding economics, and the other some stupidity regarding the military and commanding officers. I've wasted so much time on these things, time better spent trying to read the boring articles for my test on Tuesday.

I struggled with the first article so fucking much it's not even funny. I don't remember it being so terrible the first time around. Maybe I didn't read it first time around? It was written in 1977, which is way too long ago. I mean, it's no longer relevant about a lot of things, which is even more ridiculous when you consider the fact that it deals with history. I mean, there was a big political change in Israel in the 1977 elections, and the theories that are in that chapter of the book were proven inacccurate. Plus, it was written in such a pretentious language that my mind glossed over so much. I felt like Peter Griffin from Family Guy when he saw a stand up act by someone, possibly Denis Leary, who went on and on using a lot of "big" words, and at the end Peter doesn't even understand the first one. I kept thinking "well, I guess I just won't understand that part of the article."

We got two new roommates. One is from Italy, and although he smokes (which I don't like), he cleaned the kitchen area more than we ever did (which I like a lot). The other one is from Seattle, and he looks a bit clueless and lost. They're both in the upper level of the apartment, so at least I'll still have a one room buffer from my roommate. I really should use "flat-mates" and not "roommates", but that sounds too British, even to me.

I've been writing this blog as if someone is reading it, and I have a hard time figuring out whether I want people to read it or not. When I had a LiveJournal I told one of my best friends about it, and he would also leave some comments from time to time (at least until I disabled anonymous posts due to spam). This time I haven't. I kind of hoped that because Blogger is a site designed only for blogs, and even has a feature that shows when a new blog entry has been written, I'd have random people reading this and leaving comments.

On a different topic, I gave my mother's boyfriend my email address. Well, one of them, anyway. He said that he'll "send me interesting things", which to me meant that he'll be like my dad and forward me all sorts of utterly ridiculous warnings and stupid jokes and PowerPoint presentations. Since that email isn't any of my major emails I didn't check it for a while. Today I logged in and found two messages. One was a joke that I've seen before, although I don't remember when or where - "20 reasons why it's better being over 50". The other one is a weird warning. It's so ridiculous that I just have to write it in its entirety here. I'm not going to add punctuation marks or correct grammar. This is a pretty accurate translation from Hebrew, although not one hundred percent:

"Nowadays are beggard in the streets and street-corners These beggars will reach a hand to ask for change
Under no circumstances reach out to them/give them money or even talk to them these are suicide bombers that have Prostate Avian Flu
Any contact with these people is very contagious please forward this message to anyone you know"

At the bottom there's a name of a police officer, and a doctor who's supposedly the head of the contagious diseases department in a big hospital in Israel. What a surprise, there's no doctor by that name, which is not surprising. The thing that I didn't expect was that the name of the department isn't the same! Gee, I wonder if that message is true. Also, what the FUCK is "Prostate Avian Flu"? How does a respitory disease affects your prostate? It's almost as ridiculous as the stupid woman who didn't want her children near the computers when it had a computer virus. That's not just an urban legend, that's something that happened either in my sister's class or my brother's. I have to say that at least the people who came up with this particular bullshit had some guts. To write something so obviously moronic and expect it to circulate requires even more contempt to people and their stupidity than even I have. It's almost as stupid as that Southpark episdoe where the Canadian that hates Terrence and Phillip and whose name I don't remember said "I'm wishing cancer on you. I wish you had cancer." And Terrence and Phillip were afraid that he's actually going to give them cancer just by wishing it.

Well, back to the grindstone. Those articles aren't going to read themselves. Or ceast to exist, which is so much more preferable.

I really need to finish most, if not all of my assignments in twenty-nine days. July 31st, here I come. I looked at my schedule a week ago. To put it in "Magic 8-ball speak" - "Outcome not likely." I've got a test tomorrow, and then another on Tuesday next week. That leaves me 20 days to finish 3 papers by myself, and another that I need to finish with two other people. This time my luck won't help me. I won't be able to finish three papers the day before they're due. I don't want to, either.

I need to get out of the dorms. Bad. In room 1 there's Smokey McAnnoyingFriends; in room 6 there's Childish McAnnoying; rooms 2,4 and 5 are empty for now, but the maintenance people came over and made sure that at least two of them are ready for overseas students. I'm just hoping they'll arrive at the end of the month rather than now. Room 3 is mine. A small, dirty, annoying room, with no airflow and no privacy (the window is on the street's level). The dirty part is entirely my fault, of course; the other things are not.

If I could manage to study at home I would. Sadly, I can't concentrate there. I wish I knew why. There's something about that place that keep me constantly annoyed. I'm not a very calm person (it's a family thing), but something about home makes me angry about the smallest things. I'm dreading the thought of having to go back there when I'm finished with the tests and papers.

Apparently both overseas roommates left this week. Neither said so much as a goodbye. Both left some food in the cupboards. Weird, European food. The silence won't last long, I'm sure. New overseas students will come in soon enough. But for now, it's all nice and quiet. That is, unless you count the inane ramblings of one of the other roommates.

He's a second year Economics and Psychology student, and annoying about it. He keeps trying to annoy me by saying that I'll go back to studying Economics (which I dropped in favor of Political Science two years ago). He's also using whatever he thinks he knows about Psychology to annoy me further. A friend of mine, who's a third year Psychology student told me once that he doesn't understand it very well. Somehow, I'm not surprised.

He's very much like a little kid. He was looking for the paper towels, and I after he didn't see them (even though they were on the table, and I told him so), I went and gave it to him. He's like a four year old.

I'm not sure whether he's doing this on purpose or not, but whenever he comes out from his room and into the kitchen, he asks me the same thing - "What's going to happen?", to which I keep replying the same answer "It'll be good." It sounds weird in English, but it's a very common exchange in Hebrew. Sometimes he asks me "When?" and I reply "When we'll die."

I need to finish reading a book for a test on Monday, which I only started reading yesterday. Reading school books is pretty much the opposite of fun. Even when you read a fiction like I did for a class called "Literature and War", you couldn't really enjoy the books, because you knew that you had to concentrate and think about answers to the questions. It even made reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" a second time more of a chore than it should be, and Vonnegut is one of my most favourite authors, even though I discovered him just two years ago.

I need to get back to studying. Hopefully the test I took on Wednesday went ok. I don't remember if I wrote about it, but the teacher asked far too many questions about tiny details. After the test I did two things that I never do -- talked to other people about the answers, and checked to see how well I did (or didn't). Turns out I was pretty ok, although I don't remember exactly what I wrote to all the questions. Maybe if she sees that nobody (or almost nobody) got the questions right, she'll be willing to raise our grades, or ignore some of the questions. If not, there's always the possibility of taking the test again.

I've got some more to write, but I'll just leave it for another time.