Schlafenland

Those who know me well know that sleep is my most hopeless of hopeless addictions. My attempts at getting over it included waking up early to exercise, eating more raw veggies and drinking more water. Although these attempts were met with considerable success, I am still a pillow-lover extraordinaire.

My problem now is that although I love sleep, I can’t fall asleep to save my mother’s life. It takes me a good hour to an hour and a half to slumber away on a good day. On an average day, it can take up to two hours. On a really bad day, and especially if I have tea or water before bedtime, it takes me up to three hours, plus waking up to pee in one- to two-hour intervals. This is also a reason why I always turn down a cup of tea after dinner, or a glass of water after 9 p.m. even if I’m quite thirsty. I rather go to sleep on the verge of dehydration than having to wake up every hour to take a wizz (or just get up every five minutes if I haven’t managed to fall asleep yet).

Even if I am really tired (as I am now due to lack of sufficient sleep), slight distractions can keep me nice and alert for hours at a time – my husband snoring, weird sounds from the fridge or the living room sofa (don’t ask), my dog coming in to sleep next to us on the floor, and nightmares galore. Last night, my dog came to sleep with us and woke me up in the early morning hours because she was dreaming and whimpering in her sleep.

I also try various things to induce sleep: clear my mind, push away all worrying thoughts, find the most comfortable position I can, wash my face with hot water, and read, but alas. Sometimes I avoid setting the alarm if I can afford to do so. I realized that setting the alarm, especially for an afternoon nap, can keep me awake just as well. This past weekend I managed to sleep until 1:30 p.m. Such bliss!

I don’t want to resort to sleeping pills or whatever other prescription meds, but I’m running out of options.

Peace, love and sleep marathon on Passover sounds absolutely delightful

Lovin’ Oven

I love my idea of trying out a new recipe once every two weeks. It keeps my baking inspiration going and every time I bake something awesome, the satisfaction I feel and my sense of accomplishment is almost as great as what I feel when I complete a zine!

And so I decided to start keeping my recipes in zine format in a DIY cookbook notebook that I created a while back. All the pages of that notebook were blank since I made it, but decided that every time I try a new recipe and it works out, I’ll reward myself by adding it to the notebook.

I made a section for regular salty meals, for lunch or dinner, and another section reserved solely for desserts. This Friday, after I owned Betty Crocker’s ass making the best chocolate cake in the world, I added the recipe to the desserts section and felt all giddy.

“Soon enough,” I thought “this notebook will be filled with goodies and be all dirty with flour smudges, oil drops and vanilla extract stains. Just like my mom’s cookbooks are.”

So far, in the salty recipes I have my famous cheesy Penne with broccoli recipe and my lentil-rice cakes with salsa recipe. And my desserts section features recipes for my chocolate cake and my chocolate chocolate chip muffins. Other recipes I already tried but have yet to add include my sweet potato soup, my sweet potato pie, my blueberry muffins and my carrot cake muffins with the cream cheese frosting.

I also glued a measurements and temperatures conversion chart on the inner back cover of the notebook which is super handy since most of the recipes I find are from the States, but I live in a country which uses grams instead of ounces and Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. In the “belongs to” section on the front cover I wrote “Cuisine a la Badass” and “strictly kosher”. I’m truly making this shit my own!

The following is a list of other recipes I plan to try out, unlock total ownage, and eventually add to the notebook.

1. Vegetable stew recipe I found in a French cookbook
2. Chocolate chip cookies – my mom’s recipe
3. Blueberry crumb cake
4. Blueberry cookies
5. Oatmeal cookies – a recipe I’m supposed to get from my coworker soon
6. Oreo cake

The Oreo cake will be my ultimate challenge to prove to myself if I’m really Moroccan Mama material. The recipe says total time is 4 hours. That’s 4 hours worth of headbanging during preparation and baking. I’m ready.

Peace, love and wake and bake.

Sunshine Fuels Production

I feel ultra productive right now. I’m pretty sure it’s got something to do with the weather. Today is nice, warm and sunshiny. For the first time in a long time I left home without my raincoat. Word has it that it will only be getting warmer this week and it makes me giddy with productive inspiration. Israeli skies are definitely the skies to be under this February!

So this morning, I got up at the bright and early hour of 9:00 (seeing as I wake up every day at 10:30, yes, it is early for me). I had my mandatory morning tea and piece of cake, got dressed, grabbed my dog, and went for a 40-minute power-walk. It made me feel so good that I decided to change my pre-made schedule for this upcoming week and cleared my mornings for more power-walks. Then I had a rice-cake with cheese and yellow cheese for brunch before leaving for work.

I just had a fresh veggies snack and I officially feel too healthy. I need sugar. So keeping with my productive streak, I printed three recipes to try out this week – blueberry crumble, blueberry cookies and chocolate chip cookies.

I gotta go grocery shopping.

I wanna play guitar.

Oh, sun is the best thing for making stencils!

I also need to make a zine.

Today is V-Day and Metal Night. Definitely celebrating both.

I wish I had more hands.

When such things pile up, instead of doing stuff, I just sit around trying to figure out what to do first, and end up doing nothing.

Is there such a thing as being too productive?

Peace, love and SWEET POTATO PIE!!

Packing List for 2016

Right now, my life is all over the place. I have about a dozen reminders set on my cellphone every day so that I don’t forget shit. So I am making this list of resolutions mostly to set a certain order in my life and set clear goals so that maybe, with a little hope and perseverance, I may actually get it done.

1) Complete PMS issue number 13 on my trip to Salem: Lord knows it’s long overdue since my trip was in early October. I have all the written material and all the backgrounds. I just need to sit my ass down and put it together.

2) Go over all my belongings and throw stuff out: I need to do this to get ready for our move to the new apartment in mid-January. But we own so much useless stuff, it’ll take forever to go through it, so we might as well start now.

3) Start eating complete healthy breakfasts: I need to get into that habit because just having tea and cake in the morning does not fit in with the healthy lifestyle I am trying to achieve. Omelette, cheeses, fresh veggies, apple juice (because orange juice gives me heartburn). That’ll be my breakfast of champions!

4) Get a little more in touch with my spiritual side: I am considering reading a short psalm of Tehilim every once in a while. Not really chozeret bitshuva or anything, but just invest a little more in my connection with the Higher Power as She is playing a very important part in my life right now.

5) Cook and bake more: My mom says I am underestimating my potential as a Moroccan culinary genius. Coming from a long and illustrious line of such geniuses (including both my grandmothers, my mom and my aunts) I may have very well inherited that particular gene. I won’t know unless I try it out more often.

6) Practice more guitar: Yes I’ve had that resolution a while back and never really followed through with it. But now that I have a new Fender Strat to inspire me, I may actually be able to do it!

7) Complete the photo album of my husband and me: I already got all the photos in order which was a huge feat in itself. Now I need to find a way to put them all together in a pretty photo album (or several ones) and print it.

8) Avoid unhealthy environments: The bar that my husband and I go to every Sunday is filled with smoke. I decided to take an indefinite hiatus from metal night in order to avoid inhaling my way to carbonated lungs. A sad but necessary step.

9) Go to sleep earlier: And wake up earlier as a result. I find that I can achieve much more when my day starts in the a.m. For example, having time to cook my complete breakfast!

10) Power walking with my dog in the morning: Yet another thing I can achieve if I go to sleep earlier and wake up bright and early. I’m a slave to my pillow, seriously. But I should really start my day with an early rise, a healthy breakfast and a power walk, and save my pillow labor for the weekends.

Peace, love and baby steps.

A Sight to Blindfold

I pity those who believe what they see.

They say, look, truth is a subjective perception of reality, you see? But they can’t look and they can’t see. There is no perception of reality. There is only the deception of reality, and reality subjects them to it, and turns any optical illusion into their pathetic version of truth. Reality is tainted by the media, blindsided by society, projects the masses into a pitch black darkness that casts a cataract blanket over their pin-sized pupil. And this is their reality – gives them two black eyes and shoves them into a gigantic black hole.

Your astigmatized friends can’t see past their stubby little noses. Every last one of them is a color-blind cyclops with an eyepatch. They’re all afflicted with the curse of the superficial – seeing is believing. All visual art blurs into visual impairment. Technicolor fades to grayscale. Deceitful reality takes hold through a thousand prescription glasses and blurs again at the bottom of a million wine glasses.

It is only when you start seeing things that aren’t there, or fail to see things that are, that your cataract-inflicted mind sees reality for what it is – carved up and down with bloodshot lies. Reality is blind hope. It is an occular aberration slashed with far-sighted dreams.

Power comes through the unfocused, dissolved visual element. A corroded cornea, a decayed retina. A bat may be blind, but becomes a ferocious hunter in complete darkness.

I am a bat.

“Hab ich die klaren Augen, nimm mir das Licht.”

Peace, love, eyes and lies.

Looking Forward and Seeing It

Since the last time I wrote here, I got my metal plates out my elbow and the corner ghost (medically known as cataract) out of my right eye. The eye surgery took place just yesterday, but I’m feeling just fine. My distance vision has significantly improved. I can actually make out things from a distance that I couldn’t see at all before that. I’ve also noticed how much sharper the colors are around me. Blacks are much deeper, whites are much brighter, and everything in between is like Technicolor.

Of course, there are things I wish I didn’t have to see. Like, now I understand why my dog’s fur on the floor bothers my boyfriend so much. There really IS a lot of it. But my dog herself even looks more beautiful now with her deeper blacks and brighter whites and gorgeous pale blue eyes. Even I look different. Just this morning, I saw just how much white hair I have, how much darker my skin looks, and how much hair I have on my legs.

I think the best thing is seeing reality for the first time in a long time. With the corner ghost, not being able to see things that are there was bad enough. But what was worse was seeing things that are not there. My corner ghost had the annoying habit of shifting along with the many squiggly lines on my cornea and trick me into thinking I saw a movement on the corner of my eye and I’d jump out of my skin thinking it’s a roach or a spider. So now I know that if there’s a movement on the corner of my eye, I would be right to jump out of my skin and scream bloody murder.

There still are things I wish I could see more clearly. The doctor told me I will need reading glasses once I get the surgery done, so since I don’t have any for now, I can’t read any books. More importantly, I can’t read any Stephen King. And at the moment, even more importantly, I can’t finish the book I started a couple of weeks ago – Needful Things. The suspense is killing me and I can’t read it. The left eye doesn’t help much, because the corner ghost is haunting that side as well. I probably won’t exorcise the motherfucker until I come back from my trip to Germany.

Oh yeah! My trip to Germany! I’m leaving on July 29, spending about four days at Wacken, headbanging myself to metalhead oblivion, then going to Berlin on August 3 and back to Israel on August 7. We have everything set up, the plane tickets, the hotel reservations, the car, the train, the festival tickets. I’m so psyched about it, I can’t even see straight. So much for the cataract! Haha!

Besides that, I’m planning a bunch of things – write letters to my penpals, write a new zine, design a few ads for different things, get a new tattoo, make a bracelet out of the metal plate extracted from my arm – but they’re just plans and I need to make time for them and as long as I don’t get all the medical stuff sorted out, none of these will happen. I’m so sick of it already. I spend more time in the hospital and in clinics than I do at work or at home. I feel utterly lazy, except for when I’m practicing the art of wallowing in my own self pity. I keep daydreaming about the day where my elbow is fully functional, where my eyes are healed, where I get my reading glasses and where normalcy resumes. I’m expecting this to happen sometime around autumn of this year, unless something else befalls me until then. All I have left is hope for the best.

Peace, love and two down one to go

Germany, Here I Ain’t

I’ve been holding off on talking about it because I don’t like to talk about plans that may or may not happen. But now that I know for sure that it won’t happen, here it is.

I applied for this scholarship program that takes Israeli and Palestinian journalists to Germany to learn German and work in the field for six months. It seemed like a great idea, except for the fact that six months is a longass time to be away from everything I know and everyone I love. But I applied for it anyway because I was looking for a challenge, and also because I didn’t know then what I know now.

Back then, my eyes were still seeing somewhat clearly, and my elbow surgery had not yet been postponed for three times in a row. But now, things have changed and require immediate action, and I can’t be limited by these six months I would have been out of the country.

My elbow is still stuck with this goddamn plate that looks like it will never come out. I am trying to do everything in my power to get a date for a surgery and to not have it postponed yet again. Now that I am not going to be out of the country for six months, I feel much more flexible in that respect.

Also, my cataract is getting worse every time I open my eyes. My right eye is virtually blind. The other day I tested it in front of a computer screen. I closed my left eye and the screen went completely white as if the email that was there a fraction of a second ago just disappeared. The left eye itself, although better than the right, is still showing the early signs of cataract. If I wait any longer to have the surgeries on both eyes, I will be walking into walls in no time. So again, I’m relieved to have the free time to maneuver with my dates and not be limited by the six-month scholarship.

My health issues aside, I am SO relieved I will not have to miss my boyfriend and his big bear arms, my parents and their food and their phone-calls twice a day, my dog and her wet kisses, my house and its coziness, my job and its comfortable predictability, my family and their loud Moroccan craziness, as well as the country I love, and my soul which I am always forced to leave behind whenever I leave its borders. I’m still somewhat upset at not having the chance to take on this challenge, but I think it’s for the best.

Alright. Back to the order of the day.

I am planning ahead, but this time it’s plans that will definitely happen unless something absolutely tragic happens, Goddess forbid. So I can talk about these plans now. I already have a list of things to look forward to and to buy for the next few months. Seeing as I have yet to set dates for the Wacken trip (see more on that below) as well as the cataract and elbow surgeries, this list will only grow longer:

May 13: XScape by Michael Jackson
June 3: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King
June 9: War Eternal by Arch Enemy
November 11: Revival by Stephen King

Wacken is coming up this summer, so I will still find myself in Germany, but it will be for about a week or two. I keep checking the Wacken website to see if they finally posted the festival schedule – who will be playing where and when, and if there are any overlaps with the shows that I want to see. I am also super excited to go visit Berlin at some point in that trip and hopefully meet some of my friends there. I was a bit worried on how any of this will play out if I were to be accepted to the program as I will be taking intensive German courses at that time. But nope, not anymore!

I am still studying some introductory German online on Duolingo, and maybe later on, I’ll consider some further courses at the Goethe Institute or something. But that won’t be before I get all my health issues sorted out and until I am absolutely sure I am ready for a challenge.

The Mother Goddess knows best when it comes to such things and if She felt I wasn’t ready for it, then She was probably right. I just pray that She’ll see me through my surgeries, that they’ll come at the right time, that they’ll be successful, and that I’ll fully recover quickly and easily.

Peace, love and more things to look forward to.