how moving to new york changed my life?
"Am I angry about moving so much?
No--because these hardships, these infinite and infinitesmal moments of loneliness and melancholy and reminiscing and adapting to new, uncomfortable settings have shaped me in so many ways."
but they haven't, really.
and it's been a struggle, and a test. and now it's on the verge of being destroyed.
my parquet floor is littered with open newspapers. i remember in san diego i wish i had a parquet floor, and now i wish for a carpeted one. funny... i would imagine that the carpeted floor belongs here and the parquet in san diego, because of the climate and whatnot.
the truth is...
i don't know. 
and now that phrase seems so cliche. so disgustingly overblown and pretentious.
but... i really don't know.
and by now i imagine you're already turned off by this post and i bet that it's the afternoon and you were bored and you were thinking, "oh let's just see if there's another post."
i feel lost. tremendously lost. glad, but lost. unknowing. energized. lost.
i remember six years ago, thanksgiving. the autumn leaves in san jose. the apple tree. how the metal twisting playground things were cold in the morning. funny how in israel my parents never drove me from school and how weird it seemed in san jose and now looking back it's as if i've always been driven home from school.
america--as an immigrant, as a tourist. how beautiful. how bizarre. i remember standing there in gym class and suddenly a flock of great white geeze starts whipping above us, chirping. i gaze at them and as i look down the gym teacher stands there alone, smiling at me, and the entire class is already halfway across the track. those gray clouds, the way the clouds twisted in the sky--it all felt so strange, so novel.
music classes, the frog in the aquarium, filing into the classroom in the morning, the overhead projector. walking into the school, drawings, posters on the walls--and those overhead projectors in every classroom. 
listening to carpenters in the car.
...in san francisco....
the hills swaying in the fog. "This Masquerade"-Carpenters. golden gate bridge in the distance. walking next to the blue houses. you feel swallowed, and yet san francisco gives you this feeling--as if you're walking all alone down the street at twilight, or in the morning when the sun is still on the other side of the earth and the light wavers across the sky. and you're walking alone, on a lonely street corner, and the beach is next to you, and there's fog all around you, and there are lights and people on one side of you... and you feel so lonesome, and yet so comforted by the city, by the huge pyramid, by the iron-red bridge that swings across the ocean and yet is so solid, so protective...
and karen carpenter's voice.
i remember in our first winter, stopping at denny's on the way back from skiing. i wonder how--what i felt. who i was.
when you think about it, it's kind of sad--how you are so different today than you were when you were a child. 
from my trip to israel:
Six years
in america.
astonishing. oh what a way to celebrate: a week in israel.
how wonderful.
the trees outside are beautiful. yellow-leaved branches tracking over the fading white red-brick wall that stands in my backyard. the grass is coated with brown yellow leaves that glow golden in the sun.
but the skies are white.
if only you could have heard me sigh.
i bet you i have seasonal affective disorder. first off, it runs in my family; second off, this is the second year in a row that i feel dejected in during autumn.
it's terrible--the work, the isolation, the resentments. i am envious of everyone--for their intelligence, for their reputation, for their wit, for their charm... chances are, i envy you for something.
and it's so horrible. i don't know what.
sometimes i just sit there and i feel like somethings been swallowed inside of me and i'm scared to find out what it is, just utterly petrified, and i don't know what to do about it and i'm too scared to tell anyone else, especially someone who i like and cherish but have some kind of concealed resentment towards, jealousy, someone who i'm afraid might overpower me, threatens me. and i wish that this big black swallowed void inside erupts and gushes out rivers of lava and then i'd be liberated from its burden.
it's so hard. multitasking. so many things, and i'm--i feel like all of this is just swallowing me whole, all of this work and these aggravations. i can't wait till the end of the play. i can't wait for freedom, for those few months where i'll just--just be free.
i just want to stop a stranger and tell them to comfort me and just embrace me and tell me that that i'm the best thing.
i want to watch a movie, or something. something good. sit down and put my feet up and just be swallowed by a movie and just watch something for once, not do anything but watch and think, and be mindlessly broiled.
if only people recognized my talent. if only--if only i wouldn't be so pig-assed and egocentrist. if only i wouldn't admit to my errors. if only i didn't have any errors to admit to.
when i wake up at 6 in the morning for swim i don't think. it's like i'm an engine, something that runs and does but never--never thinks, never achieves.
i'm paranoid. i think people are after me. teachers hate me because i'm better than someone else who they like more. or that's what i think. i hate it when i read my own essay and i read someone else's essay and realize that my essay is better but still recieved a lower score than the other person's essay. maybe after reading my essay, the teachers inaugurates a new set of criteria so as to reduce my grade into the shriveling mass of shit that it really doesn't deserve to be.
and sometimes, i think that i'm stupid. and that i know nothing. and that however hard i may try, i fail.
and sometimes, i don't even know why
why
...
funny how beautiful life is.
how nauseatingly repetitive, and yet beautiful. 
it's autumn. the cold is a snake and its fangs are slowly swooping into my flesh.
snow: can't wait for you.
i miss airplanes. europe and israel. beirut on itunes; nostalgia from last winter's vacation, athens, petach tikva.
i'm going back home for a week in the start of november. 
i miss the feeling of being somewhere else, not nyc, not great neck, somewhere fresh and different and foreign, somewhere with a different language, a mediterranean city with enticing cuisine and riveting architecture and irresistable culture. 
romania...
oh romania. 
i want to visit you.
i want to visit the streets of my spectral childhood, the place where i never grew up, where i never lived. where my mother was raised.
blue reeds drifting in the quivering black night
like long wisps of darkness. your bowl of water
has too long washed the blood from your face,
the blood that you were born with
and the blood which tears could never part.
their skin blackens the night,
primates screeching into the oblivion
that cakes the harsh, furrowed cheeks of night.
white boots clasp into the narrow bone of your face,
cold Wyoming winds howl from deep mouth valleys
packing into the empty space where your brain
decomposed. they crucified you
on a wooden fence
with firm brown strings of blood. your father
spoke at the trial,
his voice as cold as theirs
when their tongues lodged into the toilets
in their prison cells. they are reminded
of you
every goddamned daybreak
as the sunlight crunches into their faces
like a metal boot.
today, august 22 2009; 2:00 a.m.
there's a lightning storm outside. a metallic flash, like a pinch in the sky behind the black obscured nothingness of trees, reverbreates through my window. i feel dulled, silenced, like the great tomes of time that have slowly degenerated into papyrus piles, collected in heaps across ancient tombs and museum libraries; the only thing that rejuvenates me, as the sounds of rain slide in and out of hearing, is the nostalgic songs on the most-played list of my itunes.
how uncultural.
i find that birthdays are often dull and silent. they're trifling and, when depicted as days to observe upon the future and the amorphous prospects that have yet to reveal themselves, often depressing.
sometimes, the thought that all these years--1- to 15--have all been utilized, all been chucked out like used clothes or garbage, has debilitated even the most optimistic of minds. the thought that life encompasses no second chances, and that the passage of one year does not represent the renewal of another but rather an extension of this one, is disconcerting at the least--the thought that i'll never be 15 again, never be able to experience this year again...
to me, birthdays are reflections on a year well- or ill-spent, of a year productive or redundant, a year spent learning, or a year spent forgetting.
15: it was grand. 
the crickets have returned to their stances. they ring off in hidden trees, in inky scaffolds, swirling trees, swirling stars, giant flames of crooning insects leaping into the sky like church steeples. a song--the fifth one on the most played--starts, at the moment, and, memories--of israel, of childhood, fields and fields and more black fields penetrating the horizon, obdurate and yet so remarkable in their power, creative power for a lack of a better word, like Van Gogh's The Starry Night...
...and now a Diane Keaton song from Annie Hall--Seems like old times... having you to walk with...
and how i wish i could have lived in the city, in the 70s, in the 60s... the night--slow, dripping. buildings swaying in the distance, their lights fixed stubbornly somewhere in space.
time is like clouds. when one tries to focus on the larger picture--or rather unfocus, or gaze at a different object, like a tree or a building--the clouds seemed so fixed, so unyielding. but when you start looking at the clouds--at their edges, at their shapes--they move, they tremble, they shift at an adament speed. perhaps that's how time seems like to me--so stable and so immovable when you seem trapped in it, when you try to look at the world as a whole as being a part of time. and then, when you start concentrating on the little things--on last month, how you met someone you liked--or how you got that A--time seems to swish off by. 
it's 3:09 in the a.m. here in long island and my eyes are slowly shutting. i'm about to snuggle into my andrew jackson biography and fall asleep in my own warm bed after two weeks of nomadic ritualizing across canada. post tomorrow. night.
grandmother, cousin left today.
to israel. to home.
how i miss israel. we listened to this zionist noami shemer cd today in the car on the way back from a horrible day in the city and i felt so much deep, harkings nostalgia, so much longing and so much remembering.
i'm all alone in the house. dad and sharon are driving back from the airport; it's dark, silent. the radio is possibly on. they discuss the past--the distant, distant past of our infancy, and even before--and science and history, even though in a sense everything that has to do with science or with the past is history. the radio plays softly against the thundering of the wheels against the wet highway asphalt, which sounds like a tree breaking against a violent waterfall in the middle of an empty forest. the window’s rolled down. rain—the smell of it, the cold plummeting drops—blows in. 
speaking of the devil: keys jingle downstairs, voices from outside seep in.
they just came in. the keys in the door. it turns. i say hello. shalom, dad says. sharon goes to play with ginger, and giggles, and ginger’s collar clinks.
i celebrated cousin’s departure. he's sweet, but extremely obnoxious and ignorant and acts like a 7-year-old, even though he’s 12. we love each other, but it's almost impossible to live with him. how he has to sleep with the lights and the a/c on; how he always had to have two+ eggs every day; how he always watched the most abhorrent channels, and played the most abhorrent games on the computer; how he feared ghosts and darkness and unclosed closets; how he had to have everything, play with every single electronic device our family owned, especially while we were using it; how he asked me to repeat the same song on itunes over and over again; how he was still a child, an undeveloped, exasperating child. 
they all left, and i stayed home to walk ginger. after i hugged and kissed said cousin goodbye, i came back in and closed the door and looked through the small window in the foyer, and saw grandma's bulky, familiar form, her hands reaching for the seatbelt--she always asks for my help when it gets jammed—and then i turned away, and petted ginger.
i was sad. 
now i'm listening to cat power. i'm thinking about, thrilled for the canada trip.
i'm... i don't know. i guess i miss learning french. i miss living in israel. i miss school, guide post, history. the english book we have to read is so infinitely dull and horribly stoic. "all the king's men"--brrrrrrrrrrr!....
~~~
i dined alone. in the horrid rain and wind, i stumbled and hopped across puddled pavements to a shawarma and hummus dish, and then i walked back in the darkness, thinking.
~~~
i'm excited to meet the broders again. i just went through a photo album from when i was 6, or 5. and i saw several pictures with them in it.
and i'm feelin' melancholy.
not horribly though. not really. i'm feeling... poetic, almost. no. i'm feeling... absent-minded. bare. jaded. and yet, in some strange way, refreshed almost. new.
it's been almost a year since we moved to great neck. july 30th.
i'm free!
so summer has so far been the most atrociously amazing thing that has ever happened, ever.
i got away with a 94.2% gpa, a 5 on the ap World, 800 on the hebrew sat II, and my lowest regents grade was a meager 95% (even though it was the highest out of all three of ms. afkhami's classes, woohoo!) i'm pretty sure i'll be going to college (guide post sports editor [and eic in senior year, hopefully], peer leader, [most probably] thespian, avid political savant, creative writer/blogger), and it won’t be a community college at that.
i've plenty of amiable friends, i'm learning french, spanish and romanian, i speak english and hebrew fluently, and fuck it, i'm so fucking blissful! 
i've already smelled the wondrous scent of the linden trees: oh that salacious, sexy smell of spring, sweeter than the dripping watermelon goo and even more profound than the barrenness of wafting clouds.
i've already watched the fireflies ember up from the wet, summer-soaked earth, and already felt the jagged tips of the sun slowly and excruciatingly mutate my skin’s dna. 
i've already caused pain and suffered pain on behalf of my visiting cousin matan (and enjoyed that pain), and i have already chewed on my grandmother's meat patties, already sucked in her sweet chicken noodle soup. 
today i woke up at 7:00 a.m.; i took a car ride to the french institute on 60th street, where my mom dropped me off. the human beings--clad in black suits, orange dresses, matted coats and striped jeans--clambered across sidewalks, across streets, across each other, and i slowly climbed the crowd towards a cart selling a $1 croissant and a $1.5 ice coffee. i captured a bench right at the south eastern corner of central park and watched the tourists and manhattanites [there are only two categories in this world] scramble all around me, their eyes piercing through the thick air towards me. i went to the french institute, and the lesson began sharply at 9:30 a.m. as it had yesterday morning, where a sweet audrey-tatou lookalike tutored us didactically, vigorously the vowels, the consonants, je ne ve pas, que'est-ce que est? baguette et poission, merci, s'il vous plait! and then at 12:30 p.m. i went to watch a movie for free--belle de jour, about a housewife becoming a prostitute, made in 196something, excellent--and entered about 5 minutes late, exited two hours later and had lunch (spicy chicken over rice, over salad, with a pita and a diet coke) from a central park cart for $6.50 (wow) and then parked myself next to the little strand book stand in the corner of central park (again) and looked through novels and biographies and poetry and whatnot... and then mom took me home. tomorrow i will take the train and metro, independently--that means, all alone! 
what an amazing week, two weeks, three. phenomenal beginning to summer. 
BULLET CASINGS LEFT IN FLESH:
night has slowly cascaded down her neck
like blood spurting from a freshly-bulleted
wound, as filled and heavy as a black hole.
perplexed flies drawn in by the red syrupiness
are swallowed; the skin and the flesh wane
like a rose’s petals in her arm, and darkness
settles into the scarlet sap of her tissue, burnt.
label me:
family,
great neck,
high school,
home,
poem,
summer,
sun
