A stranger's heart without a home
September 25, 2004
Another slow Saturday at work. It's been nice though. The news has been very slow all day. I just found out/was reminded why. It's Yom Kippur. If the Israeli media is taking a sort of vacation, then so are we. Sort of. Haag Samaekh l'kulam . Do some atoning for me.
My Hebrew is going down the toilet, and this makes me sad. Not that my Hebrew was ever fluent, but...eh, I got by. Sometimes. I enjoyed it. I should go hang out with the cool professor who is head of the Hebrew translation department here. He's just a few doors away, and has invited me to ome talk with him, or go into the multimedia room and watch some Israeli TV whenever I have time. I just never find the time. And every once in a while he throws some Hebrew at me. But he always does it when I'm least expecting it, and in this fast Mizrachi ("Oriental") accent. I was taught Hebrew--with the exception of Professor Sataty, bless her senile soul--the Ashkenazi way. How funny is that? A Middle Easterner being taught Hebrew the non-Middle-Eastern-accented way. Yeah, actually it's not funny at all. Not even slightly interesting.
So, as usual on these Saturday shifts I brought in a few CDs to keep me company. Today, I've had a mix Mr. Inkwell made me when I was leaving for Egypt one summer, on heavy rotation. Mr. Inkwell is the king of the mix CD, and I think I can pretty safely say that the one I'm listening to today--entitled "Half a world away" (after the REM song, which is also on the CD)--is one of my favorites from him. The problem with this mix though is that I invariably end up just putting track 14, Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You", on endless repeat. If you've ever heard this song (or any Mazzy Star song for that matter) then you know that it's easy to get sucked in and sucked down by Hope Sandoval's languid, laconic crooning. For the first two hours here I just kind of sat in a half-trance, doing as little work as possible in order to savour the feeling that washes over me when I listen to this song.
I love it. But it is also, inevitably, dimly painful. This is the song I listened to endlessly one nasty, winter week in Hurghada when I was trying to come to terms with having been abruptly dumped by a person I still cared for very much, while also plotting how to "come out" to my parents about my stateside lifestyle with the silly, mostly-subconscious hope that it would somehow bring me closer to the one by whom I'd been scorned.
What a messy, stupid time. And how oddly things have progressed since that period a little less than two years ago.
*sigh*
Fade into you...Strange you never knew. Fade into you...I think it's strange you never k n e w ....