Chanel and Trish bought a house in Portland, Oregon earlier this week, or so my mom reports. She just called, very excited, because she has all-but-committed to buy a 2BR condominium in downtown Portland. The building hasn’t been completed yet, and her apartment won’t be finished until May 2007. She’ll be on the 18th floor of what will eventually be a 23-story building. There are only 11 stories now.
Category: Life
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Firedrill in a torrential downpour
All I can say is that it better NOT have been a firedrill. I just spent the last 30 minutes standing outside of Oracle Plaza. When I went out, it was just a few drops of rain here and there. It picked up a little bit, so I wandered under a tree to stay dry.
But there were no firetrucks or police cars–not even sirens in the distance–and I couldn’t see any smoke, so I figure it was just a drill, and there was no point in walking across Ralston to another building. It’d only take a few minutes.
Then some *$&%^# security woman told me I had to move from my spot of relative dryness. I found another tree, but it’s canopy wasn’t as dense. My newspaper was soaked in five minutes. I cozied up with a colleague or four who were hiding beneath one person’s umbrella.
All I can say is that if this was a scheduled firedrill, then whoever let it go off isn’t thinking things through. Aside from the inconvenience, this is going to kill productivity. Probably a third of Oracle Plaza employees are going to go home right now, at 1 pm, because they don’t have any spare dry clothes at work.
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Beginnings of my blog
I’m not sure how long I will keep this up. Or if I even will beyond this month. But I have thought often of the long littleness of life in the months after my father died. And I thought maybe my children–if I ever have any–would like to hear of the daily littleness of mine.
Every post that pre-dates this one is taken from old journals or writings. Things I thought would be interesting to add.
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Feeling Hurt
I have been exchanging some rather heated e-mail messages with a member
of my family. (E-mail is really the best way for us to communicated,
since
my apartment has no phone, and to make a collect call on a pay phone
via
AT&T, I have to go all the way to Jerusalem.)This family member was concerned–perhaps overly–about my
attending
a few clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian youths in
Bethlehem
and Ramallah. But there was more than that. It seems that some of our
family’s
Jewish friends have made the conclusion that, because I support
Palestinian
rights, I am a somehow neo-Nazi.Perhaps I should quote the closing e-mail in our
correspondence:"It’s very difficult to find any friends here who
just let
me be proud of you. Most of them suggest that I’m nuts that I can even
sleep at night… Jewish friends’ first reaction is some comment like
‘Does
he hate Jews?’"It’s hard for me not to respond angrily to those accusations. I want to
be childish. I want to get angry and sarcastic and give my long list of
Jewish acquaintances and friends and say that you better warn them
because,
really, I’m an anti-semite and I’m plotting their demise. But I have to
get used to answering calmly, rationally, because for the rest of my
life,
some will slander me because I studied Arabic and spent time in
Palestine,
Jordan, Syria…It is an interesting conclusion, that I am an anti-Semite, but
it is
a fallacy that reveals a certain shallowness of thought, a certain
level
of naivete that exists in the political attitudes of my fellow
Americans,
Jewish or otherwise. The problem exists on several levels, and is
intimately
tied to the way we view history and to our understanding of the
Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. The two basic assumptions, though, are 1) all Palestinians
(and
Arabs) are terrorists, and 2) it is a sine qua non
that supporters
of Palestinian aspirations must hate Israelis since, well, the two are
enemies, right?