Pomp and Circumstance

A couple weeks ago, my little brother graduated from high school. Bryce has the world ahead of him. After being heavily recruited by several Ivy League schools, he decided to enroll at Yale in the fall.

But Bryce is tremendously nostalgic. He used to cry when my mom bought him new shoes because he felt bad for the old ones, and he became depressed every new years because he missed the old year. Just last month, he hid my mom's old electric mixer in his bathroom because he was upset she was going to throw it away.

Needless to say, he had a hard time during graduation. I didn't have any words of wisdom for him. When I graduated high school, I was so antsy to get to college I could barely sit through the ceremony. The only reason I was upset was because I had to wait an entire summer before I could move to Madison.

But I thought of him again about a week after his graduation. It was about 6:30 on a Wednesday night and I'd just gotten off the metro at McPherson Square and was walking to my kickball game. The McPherson stop lets off into what looks like a courtyard, and I had to walk through an archway to get to the Washington Monument where we play.

The sun was sitting and a sappy end-of-movie-like song was playing on my ipod. This was my moment. When the camera slowly zooms out as the sun casts a golden halo around my head and you smile knowing that the transition's over. She's made it in a new city.

Of course, that doesn't happen. You can't see yourself from outside, and life doesn't just zoom into nowhere. So I turned off my ipod, played kickball, got a few drinks, and went home to bed.

My family watches a lot of movies, so much so that I think sometimes we actually expect these things to happen.

But I realized that when I have those movie-esque moments, they're not at the moments you think they'd be. I don't remember accepting my diploma when I graduated high school. When I think back to my high school graduation, all I remember was trying to decide whether or not I was going to throw my hat up at the end, because they told us we weren't allowed to.

My most vivid memory from my college graduation was my friend writing obscenities in the program, and hoping that Jeff saved his unblemished copy.

I don't remember the first time I unlocked my new apartment in DC. When I think back to my first night in the city, I remember rushing my guinea pig to the hospital at 10 p.m. before my first day of work because she swallowed a bead off my necklace.

I know what my brother went through that weekend. When you know something's going to end, you try so hard to feel every moment so you can hang onto it forever. But you never do.

I wish I would've told my brother not to try too hard, because you never know exactly what you're going to remember anyway.

Maybe some day, when he graduates from Yale, he'll think back to his high school graduation and all he'll be able to remember will be a random line from someone's speech, or how he told me ten times to change my outfit because the hemline was uneven. Then maybe he'll remember this blog post. But I doubt it.

The faces behind the flotilla

I've been wanting to write something about the flotilla since it happened last week, but I wasn't sure what to say. It's not that I had no opinions on the topic--I was immediately saddened not only by the incident and the consequential deaths, but also by the overwhelmingly negative coverage Israel received in the aftershock.

It's not "cool" or "liberal" to like Israel right now. It seems that people are always looking for new reasons to hate Israel. They take the facts and manipulate them to reflect poorly on Israel, so they can root for the underdog and sleep better at night. But that's not what I want to write about.

I seriously doubt that the Israeli soldiers took the first shot, and I don't believe they became violent until they legitimately feared for their own safety. If you don't buy them not being flesh-hungry serial killers, then look at it rationally. Israel's not stupid. Massacring a bunch of peaceful humanitarians would be in no one's best interest.

I could regurgitate a bunch of news articles to back up my beliefs, but I'm not going to do that either.

The point I want to make I didn't realize until this weekend, when my boyfriend was lying in bed next to me on Saturday morning. We both had our computers open, and he was G-chatting with his best friend of 10 years who moved to Israel after college to join the army.

That's when I realized it wasn't Israel vs. the humanitarians. They were soldiers, they are people. Some of them might've been like Jeff's friend, who went to a Big Ten school in the U.S. before moving to defend the place they felt most at home. Most of them probably lived in Israel their whole lives.

But the media didn't portray them as people. They portrayed them as an entire country massacring a bunch of peace activists. In the media, the Israeli soldiers, in this incident and every other one people use to explain why Israel is evil, are not people. They are an entity, an ideal, a machine. They are easier to hate.

The truth is, I can tell you what I think happened, but I can't tell you what actually happened. I wasn't there. Maybe these particular Israeli soldiers actually were evil, and maybe they killed the activists for no reason. But I really, really doubt it.

But even if that were true, that would make the soldiers wrong, not the country, not Israel. If that were the case, it would not represent the standard in the Israeli army, which has peacefully intercepted and DELIVERED aid from ships to Gaza numerous times in the past. It would be a few bad apples. Not a bad country.

If it came out that the activists were actually violent anti-Semites, no one would dare suggest all Palestinian activists were evil and violent.

What happened was tragic, but regardless of what really happened, it's not a reason to hate. We should mourn for the individuals who died, not for a principle completely disconnected from the incident.

Photo: Jeff snapped this photo at the Pro-Palestinian flotilla protest at the White House on June 1. The man in this photo is carrying a Hizbollah flag, which is an Iranian backed terrorist group. Jeff asks, "Is this what peace looks like to the Palestinian movement?"

Flotilla

"There is little doubt as to the real purpose of the Mavi Marmara’s voyage — not to deliver humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, but to create a provocation that would put international pressure on Israel to drop the Gaza embargo, and thus allow the flow of seaborne military supplies to Hamas. Just as Hamas gunmen hide behind civilians in Gaza, so, too, do their sponsors cower behind shipments of seemingly innocent aid." -NYT article

Please send in your time sheet by Friday

This is the first time I've worked for a company that has clients, meaning this is the first time I have to bill my time on a daily basis.

It's a completely different way of thinking about time, and assessing my day. It requires a new kind of consciousness to the way I think about working. I'm not just doing my work for the sake of doing a good job, which is always how I've thought about it in the past. I'm actually taking 10 minutes here, an hour or so there and dedicating it completely to someone else's whims.

You can make the argument that in any job you bill your time to the company that you work for, but when you don't have clients, you're not cognizant that every bathroom break, every Facebook hiatus, every second you spend munching on that candy bar you hide in your desk instead of working is billed to someone.

What if we could extend this work model to the rest of our lives? That question got me thinking about how I spend my spare time, and how much of it is motivated by outside forces, and occasionally, people. I came up with a list of 13 things I do on a weekly basis, and who or what I do them for.

1. Three hours of working out to beauty magazines.

2. About one cumulative hour of sneezing to my guinea pigs. I can't live without them, but I'm deathly allergic to them.

3. Two hours of cleaning the kitchen to my boyfriend and his growing interest in the culinary arts.

4. An hour and a half of changing outfits in the morning to my mother. Her voice will forever echo in my head telling me I can't wear gray, that's not flattering, that doesn't match, etc.

5. Two hours and forty-five minutes of cleaning the apartment to my guinea pigs. Their daily average mess probably doubles their body weight.

6. Four hours of feeling guilty about doing nothing after work to Judaism.

7. Seven hours of still not doing anything despite the guilt to Facebook and the age 23.

8. Three hours of late night snacking to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

9. Five hours of nagging my boyfriend to my mother and chick flicks.

10. Five hours of him taking it to his mother, who instilled Jewish family values in him at a young age.

11. Three hours of wondering if I should wax my eyebrows to my mother.

12. Two hours of realizing I don't actually care to my father.

13. Thirty minutes of throwing up a little in my mouth when the commercials for "Sex in the City 2" come on to realizing working one hour a week and being able to afford fancy dinners, cocktail parties and designer clothes was never intended to be real.

Right now, for now

It's been a really long time since I've posted. Since then, I bumped up my moving date by two months, moved across the country and started a new job. This is the first time in my life I've committed to something without an end date.

It wasn't until I was a junior in college, and began to watch some of my friend start their job hunt, that I realized what I wanted as a 20 something post-college. Some of my friends wanted adventure. They traveled the world, many of them entering teach-English-abroad programs and using the opportunity to absorb new cultures. Others wanted to continue school. I have friends in law school and various other grad school programs.

I wanted stability. I wanted to make my own money, have a career I could excel in, and not have to wonder if after a certain date, I'd be waiting tables or ordering my second batch of business cards.

I've wanted this since I was a junior in college, when I was too young to have it. I wanted it after I graduated, when I was working a great job in Madison, as a limited term employee, enjoying being a professional, but wondering what would happen when my year was up.

I started in DC as an intern at a small online marketing firm. I was an intern for less than two weeks. On Thursday I was hired for, what in all accounts, is my dream job.

I am so excited and I feel so lucky. I worked hard, but I know that I have impeccable timing and a series of very random, and very fortunate events to thank.

My whole life I've always been working for what comes next. In high school I tried to get into a good college. In college I worked to get good internships, and, eventually, a good job. Now, I have a good job, and I intend to stay there for awhile. It's not like an internship, where I work hard to one day get a better one.

We live in a goal-oriented world, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But it makes me think about the pressure that we all endured as kids, and that, undoubtedly, our kids will feel. For them, everything is about what comes next. It's never about right now, and the few times it is, it's often written off as a distraction.

I don't know if there's a better way, but I know there was rarely an hour, between the time I first heard the word ACT and last Thursday, that I wasn't worrying I wasn't working hard enough to get what I wanted. And that I would fail.

For the first time in my life, I can enjoy worrying about doing well at what I'm doing for the sake of doing well, and not for something far in my future I can't yet comprehend.

But I don't quite understand how to do that yet. When my brain defaults into, "oh crap, what am I not doing right now that I should be doing to not screw myself over," mode, it takes a minute to remind myself I don't have to do that anymore...for now.

I'm sure there will be some promotion or some project with a very specific long-term goal I'll be focused on soon enough. It won't be long until I forget all about this brief interlude. I just hope that one day, when I have children, and they're freaking out about college or an internship or even soccer tryouts, that I'll remember this, and have something insightful to say. Because right now I don't. I can just say it is what it is. For now.

What's the big deal?

Newsworthy? Sure. Worthy of #4 spot on CNN's Latest News posts on home page? Definitely not. What are you trying to say, CNN?

I think the "Weekend at Bernie's" impersonator's are far more deserving of this honor.

Shirlington Village

Yesterday, Jeff and I looked at an apartment in Shirlington Village in Virginia. Though it’s just out of DC, it’d be a few metro stops and a 20 minute bus ride to get into the city.

The apartment was inconceivably beautiful, with a luxurious rooftop terrace, brand new cabinetry and appliances, a clubroom that looked like something out of a mansion and a workout room with personal televisions on all of the equipment. The leasing office treated us like royalty and we were drunk on indulgence.

Shirlington Village looked like something out of a storybook. Everything—restaurants, boutiques and bars—was new and crisp, down to the freshly laid bricks on the streets and sidewalks.

It had the charm of an old European town with the intrigue of the new and novel. It was perfect. A place a young girl always dreams of living with the one she’s going to marry.

I kept thinking, we could actually afford this. Sure it’s luxurious, but with its distance from the city combined with the dual income toward a one bedroom apartment, it wasn’t out of our price range.

The whole time we were there, I kept imagining bringing my parents to our new neighborhood. They’d be so impressed. She really made it, they’d think. I’d made it, I’d think.

I was so busy looking at designer clothes through store windows and reading restaurant names off awnings that I almost didn’t notice all the baby strollers and toddlers.

That’s when we realized what we’d be giving up by moving to this amazing apartment and this beautiful village—the rest of our youth.

If we lived so far away from the city, we’d probably rarely venture to DC for drinks with friends after work, and nights out on weekends. We probably wouldn’t have much opportunity to host friends from the city at our apartment. We’d make friends, but they’d most likely live near us, and would probably be older and maybe even have children.

We had a choice to make. Luxury verses location. Settling down verses relishing the last few years we have left of our youth.

Once we were out of the Shirlington Village, its spell released us fairly quickly and the decision was easy. Location. Nearby metro. Washington D.C.

I still plan on bringing my family to Shirlington Village when they visit. I know they’ll love it just as much as I did, and I can tell them Jeff and I will live here, one day, when we’re ready.