Giving Up

Home, sweet darling home

Just before I left Israel in June, I felt like somehow my life was a bit out of control.  Not out of control like a runaway train or anything - more like when you are driving really fast on a road and keep narrowly missing obstacles.  I had a sort of almost manic air of self destruct about me.  Daily drinking never does me any favours for one.  And I don't even need to mention the facial injuries yet again, or the 5am stumble out of a nightclub evenings, or the hangovers.  Oh god, the hangovers.  I actually even started smoking cigarettes again.  It took me by surprise.  I haven't had a ciggie since a month long dalliance with the stupid things during the 'Summer of Spain' in 2006.  But cut to a fair few drunken nights out in Tel Aviv, which somehow lead to a few drags, and before knew it I was popping out to the local convenience store and buying singles to take home and smoke on the bathroom window ledge wearing a shower cap and a pair of latex gloves, and then giving myself a perfume shower so I wouldn't get sprung later by my husband.

This is her grotty balcony (cushions to the left next to dish looking thing)

I'm pretty sure I looked exceeding stupid, but luckily the old lady who lives in the apartment block directly opposite us is half blind (probably not so luckily for her though I guess).  And she is also crazy.  I met her in the street one day after trying to explain to her that our two couch cushions have been on her roof for two months (since a windy spell blew our couch cover and 6 cushions all over the neighbourhood never to be seen again).  It turned out she hadn't seen them because she has a sight impairment, and is basically deranged.  I used to wonder why she would always walk outside in a grotty singlet and her very old pair of skin coloured underpants.  It was a mistake chatting to her that day.  For a start we couldn't communicate properly, but she still managed to hold me in awkward misunderstood conversation for 25 minutes.  She hadn't seen the cushions of course.  Had no idea what I was talking about.  Instead she told me about some table that the couple who used to live in our apartment had delivered to her house one day.  I mean she really went into detail here, I just couldn't work out if the conversation was ever going to stop.  I kept breaking it off, only to get followed to my door with intense descriptions about the size of the thing.  Apparently it was very, very large. I guess it would be a nuisance in a tiny apartment.   I do wonder now if we'll ever get our cushions back. They just lie there, exposed to the elements, a mere 10 metres away, taunting me with their close but unattainable presence - held captive by a crazy blind lady with horrible undergarments, and I just can't get truly comfy on the balcony sofa.

Come home my darlings.....

So it was time to give the durries away again, stop boozing, get my shit together and freshen up - and what better place to do it than a tropical island.  As we indulged in a very laid back lifestyle, and had no social life what-so-ever, it was also easy to eat mainly raw foods, not drink, and be a total health freak.  Its such a pattern for us, I like doing it so much, and the great feeling a lifestyle like that has on you ends up extending for about 2 months - even once you start the inevitable slide back into the re-tox of everyday life and social commitments .

Freshness is (was) miiiiiinnnnneeee

But since returning home to Tel Aviv I have been somewhat focused on more ways of giving up.   Celebrity website viewing, manicures, buying fashion magazines, picking my nose, finding excuses not to write, wasting my time, sleeping in everyday, using so many full stops in a row whenever I write anything; These are all under new current restraining orders.  I am also trying to cut back on time spent on social media.  I am currently on once a day, soon I will change it to 3 times a week and eventually 1 time a week, and then maybe just once a month (ahhhhhhhh).  I think its a good plan, I've been getting far too carried away with it of late.  I'm annoying myself, so I extend my deepest apologies to everybody else too.

So so good to come back to

It is great to be home.  I realise that I'm not breaking new ground by constantly saying this - but I can't get over the feeling.  This has been the first time we have left for an extended period of time, and actually returned to a home of our own.  It really is a new experience.  Usually we would pack up our lives into 3 suitcases and move onto to the next rental.  You would compare the new rental with the last one - feel a little disdain at the dirty drawers of cutlery, and the Teflon peeling pots and pans, and try not to think about how many heads had lain down on the pillows.  Sometimes being in a hotel is worse.  Even though they clean it much better, and the sheets and pillows look really white and much newer than in some rental places, the deep filth would be penetrating.

Really having a go

There would be a greater number of randoms passing through a hotel room for sure.  That's more stranger's pubes, hairs, skin particles, mites that eat skin particles.  See what I mean - it's a gross thought.  And there are other annoying things about hotels.  Too many "hellos' to stupid people whenever you step a toenail outside your door (staff or guests, they are all equally irritating - grovelling versus icy aloofness - take your pick) .  Those stupid mini bar fridges are always shoved full of excessive amounts of overpriced drinks too (don't ever get pissed at a bar and come home and crack the mini bar champagne and ring Australia from the bedside phone, I beg you).  You can never fit a thing inside them even if you unpack the drinks completely. You always eat the $16 chocolate bar - every night after they're replaced, and you always spend a sizable chunk on hotel bottled water.  Fuck you Fiji.    There's always crappy tea bags but never any milk.  But all of this doesn't matter.  My top advice to all and sundry is this;  Never, ever use a hotel coffee machine.  I am totally disturbed after seeing some TV show where hotel cleaners described the worst things they ever had to deal with in hotel rooms.  By far the very worst was one poor woman who had to clean out a coffee machine that someone had done a poo in.  Can you believe it?  That takes a serious amount of wanting to be a total cunt just for the hell of it.  It also takes a lot of manoeuvring to get your bum to a coffee machine.  It's possible he unplugged it and took it to the bathroom I guess.  Or she - "women are just as dirty as men.  Women are filthy".  (David Brent, The Office).  Staff wouldn't bother to clean it though would they?  They'd just chuck it - oh please say they'd chuck it.  Unless it was a Nespresso machine - they're pretty expensive, but then again you'd have to be a contortionist to get an on-target drop-off into that tiny pod hole.

Will this sight ever be the same again?

Here's a special shot to brighten your days

Now, re-intrigued by this topic I decided to further investigate hotel room grossness.  The poo flavoured coffee wiped out all the other examples I'd heard on the rest of the show, so I had to do a little Google action for some new inspiration.  Some poor 14 year old sucker described how she went to clean a room and the entire bed was soaked in blood, and that she also found several bloody pads shoved in the half melted ice bucket (told you women were filthy).  There are a lot more poo ones - someone hiding a poo in the tissue box (again - how the hell would you get it in there?).  A mobile meth lab was another discovery, hundreds of maggots, rotten food, a python, a completely vomit and poo covered room that had to be totally refurbished (or are they just saying that, and just got a crate of Mr Sheen on the job?).  Dead bodies made an appearance, vomit covering the inside of an oven in a rental property (that is another example of a certain dedication to the act of being a bastard), but pretty much it's basically lots of piss, blood and poo (one arsehole left a note for the hotel maid saying 'I pissed everywhere except the toilet, enjoy cleaning it up').  There's no way they replace the furniture every time either.  So, enjoy your next hotel stay everyone.

Someone's happy

To go home to your own filth feels so much better.  Plus, I've always been willing to use toilets and rubbish bins for my bodily excrement, and I encourage my family and guests to do likewise.  And even though we have accumulated a hell of a lot of stuff since shacking up here, which freaked me out a little (accumulation sneaks up on you slowly and is all encompassing) that is also kind of nice.  So many more outfits to choose from, our own books, the crumbs in the toaster are ours and nobody else's.  I also  have heaps of plastic take away containers - and a million lids none of which fit any of containers.  Ahhhhhhhh.  Even my 5 year old daughter said to me the next morning "Mum, isn't it nice to have our own little things around us?" It really is my darling little poppet .

I have started spring cleaning though.  When you get used to going through your stuff every couple of months it feels strange to just let it hang around.  The bathroom drawers, what the hell? Never has there been seen so much useless shit hanging around never getting used.  I'm suck a sucker for stupid chemist items sometimes, I really am.  And my hairs, don't forget them.  How do so many of my hairs get some many places?  So many of them can't keep falling out at that rate without leaving me bald in some patches.  I love that stand-up skit by Jerry Seinfeld who says that when the hairs are attached to the head, you love them.  You stroke them, compliment them on their luxuriousness, play with them.   But as soon as one of those hairs gets free, it becomes the most disgusting thing on the face of the earth.  It's so true.  I really can't stand hairs left in hair brushes.  Especially someone who uses your brush and doesn't remove their hairs.  Or hairs that wrap around your fingers when you're taking a dip in your local pool.  All kinds of filth there.  Or a hair on your toothbrush.  That is horrible.  Don't even go there on hairs in food either.  Sadly I am a terrible culprit.  Every time I cook it's like the penny in the Christmas plum pudding.  Who is going to be the one who ends up with my hair"  Because someone always does.   Its a genetic thing too.  My mother and sister have learnt the hard way, and I have often spotted the two of them wearing shower caps when they prepare anything a multitude of people might be planning on eating.

Facemasks, gloves and headscarves at every stand

I think the two of them might have been Japanese in their past lives.  The Japanese are the most concerned with cleanliness that any other race on earth.  All the workers in food halls are basically wearing quarantine suits and head pieces while they make sandwiches and pass out cake samples.  It's comforting.  Then again, some of them are pretty kinky too so I wouldn't completely trust your Tokyo deluxe hotel suite come to think of it.  And who really knows what they do with those gloves while on a their 15 minute breaks.  It's the opposite of Israeli in that country.  Here you'd better hope those digestive juices are strong.  There are so many displays of open food (that you'd never get a permit to serve in Australia), and various dodgy looking dudes cutting up your borekas with cigs dangling out of their lips.  Not a hair-net in sight, or a glove to be honest.

Really truly the worst

I'll tell you what though - I have other issues on my hands.  Far, far more serious than a pube on my toothbrush.  School holidays.  My children are currently like caged tigers due to my refusal to take them outside in the day.  Seriously I can't even go to the beach - the sand is so incredibly hot.  It scalds the bottoms of the feet.  I'm not exaggerating, you get tenderness.  Sick of the glitter apocalypse my house has become thanks to a tattoo set they got for their birthday, I took them out of the house and along to the LEGO show at the port two days ago  It was one of the worst outings of my life.  Crowded, boiling hot (in some hanger without proper air conditioning), psychotic children, over priced LEGO, queueing in the sun to get in.  Highlights included; my children getting smothered in some cheap allergy inducing make-up by some woman (Cordi chose neon yellow lipstick, purple eyeshadow and orange cheeks - ok then), Vali fending off a psychotic baby (soaked in its own piss) trying to bash her with a fry pan while the mother chatted on the phone, the only food and drinks available were fairy floss and slushies, the exit was another "high"light - as it was through a gift shop with LEGO selling at 4 times the usual price, and finally, one of the initial star attractions was a tiny LEGO model of The Iron Dome (rocket defence system - responsible for keeping Israelis alive over the last 5 weeks).  I will never go anywhere again.  For the love of god bring on the start of the school year.

And yet - unmoved

Work it Cordi

Psychotic baby in foreground (before the shit got real)

I think they could have done better to be honest

This is how I felt the entire time

So now, what comes next?  To get on with life again I guess.  Currently my immediate plan is to sit on my balcony at 4.30am, and reflect on how fortunate I am in my life (with the help of a 'green moment'.  It for my glaucoma ok - the medical stuff is legal here).  I never even knew what glaucoma was, until about two days ago - despite the constant jokes about using pot as a treatment option for that particular condition. I thought maybe it was something to do with blood sugar levels.  Actually, it's for damage to the optic nerve, so there you go.  Also it's yet another item I should add to the Give Up list (green moments not glaucoma).  What a bore.

But back to the reflecting I plan to do; I'll start now - lately Ive been struck with how I manage to move with such ease between places, never for one second imaging that I would be refused entry into any country I wished to go to.  I've never been persecuted against because of who I was born as.  My life and the lives of my family are as safe and secure here (touch wood!), as they are anywhere I choose to be.  It really doesn't seem fair sometimes.  It seems such a cliche thing to say, but you really do have to treasure your moments don't you? Sometimes you forget too, and then you just walk around kind of empty without really wondering why, or even noticing.  That's another thing I'm going to give up.  I'm going to give up forgetting to treasure my moments.  I just hope I can remember my latest self imposed item for dismissal when my child wakes me up by slapping me in the face far too early to ask me some annoying question like this morning's little one "Mum - why do caterpillars have so many legs".  "So they can run away super fast from their caterpillar mummies who want to murder them for waking them up at dawn sweetie pie".  I also think I should concentrate on giving up going to bed so late.  I've been blaming the jet lag, but now I suspect I've just got an attitude problem.  But at least I can look on the bright side.  A whole blog entry without a single row of full stops.  This has got to be a first.  Told you I was determined (next I'll work on my over use of brackets and exclamation marks - and hyphens -)!!!

There's no fucking way I'm giving up posing or selfies