Exhausted Sleep Times

Last night an obnoxious and completely childish mosquito kept me up by buzzing in my ear every half hour or so so that I only got about two and a half hours of accumulative sleep, and as we all know, accumulative sleep is the worst kind of sleep, especially if there's only two and a half hours of it.

I woke up at 8:20, got myself ready for a difficult day (soooo tired), and then took the bus to Jerusalem.  Maybe it was because I was so sleep deprived, but for some reason I found myself NOT overanalyzing every possible outcome of the bus travel, NOT freaking out that I didn't know EXACTLY where it was going to drop me off, and NOT panicking at all in general.  I'd like to think that that's me having grown up in the past two months, but it could also have been that horrible mosquito.

I came to Jerusalem today to interview my mother's uncle Rueven Kaminer, who's basically an Israeli-Palestinian conflict scholar.  He's very famous.  Howard Zinn mentioned him in his forward for the People's History of the United States.  (Fun fact: Matan, my mentor from La Escuelita, and Rueven's grandson, translated the People's History of the United States from English to Hebrew.  As in, anyone who's reading the Hebrew copy has only done so because Matan is awesome.)

Rueven made some really interesting points in the interview.  When I asked him what he believed to be the root of the conflict, he said it was ultimately that there were two national movements from two different groups of people pushing for the same tiny piece of land.  In Europe, as consequence of the Diaspora, the Jews were developing Zionism, and the Arab world all around what was then called "The Holy Land" was going through independence movements from whatever Empire they were suffering occupation from at the time.  (Automan...British...who knows?)

After the interview I had lunch with Rueven and his wife Dafna (who is my grandfather's sister) and after a short nap (they napped, I was stupid and for some reason didn't), we went to a very interesting art museum in Jerusalem.  It was a social modern art museum, so their current exhibit was all to do with protest rights.  It was AWESOME.  After that, Rueven showed me some neighborhoods in Jerusalem where Hasidic Jews have somehow managed to get their hands on court orders that the neighborhood houses actually belong to them and not the Arabs that live there.  There was one house we saw where it was literally divided into two - the front room was for the Israelis and the back room was for the Arabs.  HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?!  I asked him if there was a lot of violence between the Jews and the Arabs in those neighborhoods and he told me that there have been some occasions, but the police are REALLY diligent in those areas.  After that we had dinner and it was lovely.

Tomorrow Udi and Alon and their friends and I are going to the DESERT to go camping for a night.  I literally know what I am doing for the next two weeks.  Now I'm too exhausted to even digest anything that happened to me today (I helped three loud, slightly ignorant and stupid American college frat boys - it was quite funny.  They didn't know what street they were staying on.  I told them that was probably something they should figure out, and fast.  I also told them not to take a cab, because the cab driver would take one look at these buzzed, Jewish American college boys and charge them like, 50 shekels each to get from one side of Tel Aviv to the other (it should only really cost 50 or 60 tops).).  <--That was a long parentheses.

Rueven gave me a copy of one of the many books he has written on the subject.  It's called The Politics of Protest: The Israeli Peace Movement and the Palestinian Intifada.  I think we already have a copy of it at home.  In either case, I want to find another copy to give to Tom, because I think it'd be really useful to his class on radicalism, even though it's not American radicalism.

Also, in other news, I hate all insects.  Stupid mosquito.  I swear, when he landed on my face and I flipped out and my toe hit the corner of my laptop and now it's BLOODIED AND THE TOE NAIL IS RIPPED, I could HEAR THE MOSQUITO LAUGHING AT ME.

Sleep....