Perhaps You Can Tell that it's Only 20 Degrees Outside?

I am generally cold. People like Javert like to joke about it. For example, in Israel we went to the En Gedi nature preserve, where we learned about and saw an animal called the hyrax. Reading the sign (which was geared towards children and therefore written in the first person, from the perspective of the various animals) out loud, Javert replaced references to "hyrax" with references to me. As in: I am Emil. I have difficulty regulating my body temperature. In the morning you will often find me laying in the sun to stay warm.

My proclivity to get colder than other people prevents me from wanting to do certain activities, like skiing or swimming. I think I was never colder in my life than the day I went white water rafting in Maine, wearing an ineffective half wet suit. I was so happy to get back to camp that day, and I hated that camp more than anything.

But here is another reason to avoid cold water--and wet suits--which I found on BBC News today. The headline was Shark Survivor Speaks of Battle. Eric Nerhus was almost eaten by a shark--here's how the article describes his experience:

"His head, shoulders and one arm were inside the shark's mouth during the attack, off south-east Australia. Mr Nerhus, 41, says he survived by feeling for the shark's eye socket and stabbing with his fingers, prompting the shark to let go....'Half my body was in its mouth,' he said...Experts have said that there is a possibility the shark mistook the wetsuit-clad Mr Nerhus for a seal. 'Normally they feed on seal [...] so it's bitten in on this guy thinking he's a seal,' shark specialist Grant Willis said. He said that when the shark realised Mr Nerhus was not a seal he may have spat him back out again."

I'm very glad that Mr. Nerhus was all right in the end, but I also think this is super funny. He tried to better regulate his body temperature while diving and it led him right into the mouth of a shark.

Also, do you really think that sharks care whether they are eating seal or humans? Both probably taste delicious to, as the BBC video puts it, these "killing machines."

Beauty and the Geek

I've been hiding a secret--I've been watching a reality tv show. It started because Javert's coworker went to her senior prom with one of the contestants and we wanted to see what he looked like. Unfortunately, I am now addicted to this program. Basically they pair up a male "geek" with a female "beauty" and both individuals compete against other similar teams to try to win at tasks designed to improve their coolness (for the men) on their intellect (for the women). Each episode has two tasks, one for the men and one for the women, and the two winning teams get to select two other teams to compete for the chance to remain on the program (the losing team gets eliminated.)

The thing is, most of the "geeks" aren't geeks at all. Maybe I'm biased because I married someone who went to MIT, have a brother who went to MIT, and have a father-in-law who went to MIT, but most of these guys seem pretty normal to me. Yeah they might be a little obsessed with Star Trek (although that one guy NEEDS to get rid of that uniform) and a little self-conscious, but who isn't? I have been known to watch multiple episodes of Star Trek myself and I may or may not have the complete TNG episode guide on my bookshelf at my parents house. (And maybe I am a geek too.)* They all seem like more-or-less interesting people who happen to have made socially unacceptable clothing or hair decisions. I guess they could learn to focus more on girls' personalities rather than their bodies, but I feel like almost every guy alive needs to do this, so these particular ones are not any exception.

Now to the women. I wouldn't consider most of these women beautiful, but apparently some people do since they all seem to work as models. Most are tall, blond, skinny yet "womanly," and presented as totally stupid. I don't think that having big breasts means a person is stupid (duh!) or beautiful but I do know about how they turn a normal person into a sex object, and it's easier than you might think to get sucked into that impression of yourself. But it's hard to tell at all what the women on this show think about themselves, because they're only ever shown cuddling in bed or sunbathing or cheering on their teammates. You don't hear about their "transformation" like you do with the men. Their tasks have them memorizing facts so they can act as museum guides or reading snippets of Freakonomics so they can interview one of the authors. So far, these tasks do not appear to have affected them at all--these women appear to be quite happy with their (intellectually vacant?) lives. I'd like to say they have started to appreciate the "geeks" more--and they do seem to now appreciate the guys personalities--but I don't see any of them dating these geeks anytime soon despite the guys' (appealing?) personalities.

I hate that "geekiness" is something that the men need to overcome when really they just need some self confidence and a change of clothes. I also hate that "beauty" means "no brains."
I think the show would be much more interesting if both groups were the same gender. How great would it be to have "geeky" guys pair up with "cool" guys, or ugly girls with wolf-dog shirts pair up with models?

*I took the Are You a Geek? quiz on the show's website, and the result: I'm Very Geeky.

Econo-Wash

Let me tell you how crazy I am.

A while ago Javert and I ran out of dishwasher detergent. We didn't like our old brand because it made spots on our glasses, so we did some research to find out the two top rated detergents. I went to the store and found both and compared them. One box was full of little pellets that you place in the dishwasher and said it would last 25 loads. The other box was the standard powdered detergent. They were the same price.

Using my 4th grade math skills I decided to buy the powder because it looked like we'd get more than 25 washes out of it. But I needed to be sure. Therefore I instituted the dishwashing detergent checkmark policy. Every time you fill the dishwasher with detergent, you need to make a tick mark on the back of the box. That way, when it's finally empty, we'd know how many loads we got out of it.

Javert has problems complying with my policy. He forgets to make the tick marks sometimes, or he'll purposely "forget" to put the powder in so that I'll have to do it. Recently he's gotten mean about it--he won't tell me whether or not he's made a tick mark, which drives me insane. Last night we stood in the kitchen for 10 minutes while he taunted me. Had he put the mark on? Maybe he did and maybe he didn't. I still don't know the truth.

So far we've gotten over 30 washes (maybe more due to non-compliance reasons) out of the powder box, and I think there's at least enough left for one more load. The thing is, I'm still curious about the pellets. Maybe they wash better. And I'm yearning to hold one of them--all plasticky and smooth. I bet they smell good too. And so I will be purchasing them when we run out of powder, even though they are less economical.

I miss the Bisli

All the blogs I read are full of New Years Resolutions. I don't do that sort of thing so you aren't going to find any of it here. I just hope to be happy in 2007. That is all.

I just got back from a family trip to Israel and Jordan. When I say family, I mean my immediate family plus 6 cousins. We had our own minibus. 7 out of the 11 of us were under 26. The trip actually wasn't as crazy as it sounds, and we had a good time and stayed safe and all that...

I want to talk about an incident that occurred during our one night stay in Eilat, which is a small city at the very southern tip of Israel, on the Red Sea. I was so excited about going there because it's supposed to be a beachy resort where Israelis go during the winter. WRONG! There was a beach, but there wasn't anything "beachy" about Eilat besides the sand and the crappy boardwalk vendors that we have in Ocean City. And I heard way more English than Hebrew. Also, it was FREEZING. Colder than it is in New York! How does one reconcile wearing a down jacket (and still shivering) and being surrounded by palm trees and turqouise blue water? Last time I was in Eilat, which was in May 1998, the sand was so hot I couldn't walk on it, and I went snorkeling and thought the water was too hot.

Anyway, we checked into our hotel, the Eilat Holiday Inn Patio. We had been warned about this particular hotel, but the warning came from an unreliable travel agent and contradicted what we'd read in our guidebook and on trip-advisor (can you see where I'm going here?) We picked it mostly because all the other hotels required a week-long stay and cost over $200 more per night.

Among the various problems at the Eilat Holiday Inn Patio: First, the hotel rooms are atrium style, opening onto a central area featuring a pool table, a ping pong table, a koi pond, and a tv. This means it is LOUD in the rooms. The cups and mugs in my hotel room were all filthy. There was foreign hair in the shower. The bed was clean, but there was a cot set up in the room for unknown reasons. The reservation was listed for 15 people instead of 11, and it took us around 30 minutes to check in because of this error.

Then there is the location: The Eilat Holiday Inn Patio is adjacent to BOTH the bus station and the Airport. To get to the boardwalk, one must walk past the bus station, turn the corner, walk through a red-light district (okay, there was one store called Sexy Shop or something like that, but it adds to the effect here), and then go around the airport to the beach. It takes about 15 minutes unless you are one of the over-age-26 members of your group, in which case it takes all night because you will get lost.

Javert and I went to dinner with my parents and a cousin and then walked around the promenade. We contemplated getting coffee (we contemplated this at just about every single place they sold coffee in Israel, but only ended up getting it like 3 times because we are lazy and cheap) and walked to the end of the promenade and back and then decided we were bored. I'd heard that Eilat was so much fun and so I called my brother, who'd gone to dinner with the other 6 people in our group, to see what he was doing. Unfortunately for me, he was about to go to sleep and said Eilat was "less fun than advertised."

As we headed to the hotel, I said to Javert "You know, I'm going to sound old, but that music is just too loud!" Javert responded with a crotchety "It's eardrum damaging loud." (And I knew I had picked the correct spouse.) The music emanated from a tent set up on the sidewalk near a mall and around it were bunches of drunken American teenagers (maybe they were older, I'm terrible at guessing ages). Clearly we had come across the advertised fun.

Deciding that watching Spider Man II in the hotel room was more fun than partying with these people, we went to a minimart to stock up on bottled water and Bisli. We also decided to buy a Goldstar beer, which we'd seen advertised all over the place. In the minimart were at least 10 drunken Americans actually-literally--screaming about how they needed to buy more beer or more mixers ("the mixer is for you, Debbie, I have my own mixers.") or more vodka or the cleverly designed vodka and red bull combo pack.

I am usually not embarrassed to be an American tourist. I live in New York City and see that most tourists, no matter where they're from, are stupid. You can't help it. You don't speak the language, the culture is foreign and different, you don't know the area. And I get annoyed, but most of the time I just think it's funny. I like to watch tourists on the subway trying to figure out if Times Square is the same as 42nd street. I happily give people directions. I like living in a place that attracts tourists from across the country or from halfway across the globe.

However. I was terribly embarrassed to be an American tourist when I was in that minimart. Luckily I wasn't dressed like a skank or screaming about liquor, but I still fumbled with the Shekels I needed to pay for the groceries and spoke in English to the cashier (I don't know why I did this since I speak enough Hebrew to get by--and this happened the entire trip). I suppose it's a combination of being on vacation and being too young to drink at home and being surrounded by Jewish people of the opposite sex (meaning mother-approved for dating and marriage) that made these people act this way. But it still made me want to kick them.

Back at the hotel, we realized that neither the heat nor the hot water worked. I consoled myself with half the Goldstar beer--which incidently we opened using the bottle opener attached to the bathroom wall, which I guess was the one good thing about this hotel--and with the pizza flavored Bisli.

Luckily both Javert and I slept well despite the cold. I woke up early enough to have a lukewarm shower and warm up with fake coffee at breakfast. Unfortunately, my parents and cousins had not had as comfortable a night. My mother wore every item in her suitcase in order to stay warm. One of my cousins saw a cockroach in her room (which thank god she did not mention until we had left the city altogether). We all piled into the minibus after breakfast and waited for 30 minutes as the four over-26'ers argued with the front desk about a refund for our crappy night. I think they ended up getting 10% back which if you ask me was not worth 30 minutes of sitting on a minibus, but it's their money so I can't really complain.

Anyway, I won't be returning to Eilat any time soon. The rest of the trip was great, but really who wants to hear about how wonderful someone else's vacation was?