It must be wonderful to be in the Holy Land for Christmas

Thanks to Facebook many of my old friends know that I live in Israel. Most of them are not Jewish and have never been to Israel -- yet they have an idealized vision of Israel at Christmas.

It's actually very funny because most people who have never been to Israel (predominantly non-Jews) seem to think that you are going to get shot by a sniper the minute you exit the plane at Ben Gurion airport.... unless, of course, it is Christmas!!!! And then for a few days, I guess they just figure that we are all walking around (safely) singing Christmas carols, hugging our fellow man and waiting for the three wise men to show up, hot on the tail of a really big star. Does anyone out there see the flaw in this logic?

Bad news for you non-Jews out there who have never been to Israel: you are sadly deluded. This past Sunday, December 25th, while you were all home waiting for Santa and turkey, we in Israel were experiencing a regular old Sunday.

Sorry about that. There's just no nice way to deliver bad news.

This past Sunday I got up, walked the dog, did a few errands, visited with a friend from Canada, cleaned my house a bit, did a load of laundry, and so went the day.

Now it strikes me that somewhere in the Holy Land someone must have been celebrating Christmas. It all started here and I am sure there are some stragglers who want to recreate that time and all the special feelings that supposedly went with it. I mean, it is possible. I have seen the odd Christmas tree in Haifa in previous years and I am sure if you hiked to the top of Mount Tavor, the Greek Orthodox church up there must have been preparing for something, but the truth is that Bethlehem and Nazareth are Arab cities and rest assured they don't buy the whole Jesus thing. Well actually, in terms of tourist dollars, I am sure they can fake it, but when have you known Islam to be tolerant of people with different beliefs? Exactly.

According to the website www.ajc.com there were almost 100,000 visitors to Bethlehem this Christmas Eve. As for Nazareth, my Google check didn't up much although there are more Christians living in Nazareth then you will ever find in Bet Lechem (Bethlehem to you).

Here's what Wikipedia (my favourite source for miscellany) says: "Christians are the smallest religious group of the Abrahamic religions in Israel. Most Christians living permanently in Israel are Arabs or have come from other countries to live and work mainly in churches or monasteries, which have long histories in the land...

"According to historical and traditional sources, Jesus lived in the Land of Israel, and died and was buried on the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, making the land a Holy Land for Christianity. However, few Christians now live in the area, compared to Muslims and Jews. This is because Islam displaced Christianity in almost all of the Middle East, and the rise of modern Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel has seen millions of Jews migrate to Israel..."

So, there you have it. Jesus was Jew so of course he lived here. All the Jews lived here way back when ... Jesus was knee high to a grasshopper!

I hate to disappoint my old friends. Particularly the one who wrote to me on Facebook last Sunday after I sent him a merry Christmas message: "It must be wonderful to be in the Holy Land for Christmas."

Actually, it's wonderful to be here everyday.

They're kidding, right?

Yesterday I received a message on Facebook from someone working at my undergrad university whose job it is to find alumni that have fallen off the university's potential donors list. Egads (for those young folk out there, it sort of means "yikes" although it is actually a slang form of OMG)!!!!!!!! Can you imagine a university going to such lengths to find its alumni?

Of course you can.

Debbie, my new friend from McMaster University's Data Entry Department, sent a lovely inquiry letter asking if I was me and apologizing if I was, in fact, someone else. She wasn't sure I was me because one of my Facebook pages only lists me by my married name and not the maiden name that she probably has on her list.

That's one of the big problems with having an unusual first name. Even if someone doesn't have all your data, partial data will probably do the trick. And together with a quick Facebook search of graduates from McMaster .... voila, there you go. Yipee doodle, I was found.

Frankly, I have been happily lost for years. I wasn't hiding but I also made no effort to be found. They did catch wind of me about 12 years ago when I realized that I had lost my undergraduate diploma and I called them and asked for a new copy. Once they had an address to which they could send the diploma, they felt free to start sending me all sorts of crazy junk mail. However, the joke was on them -- the address I gave them was my parents'. The point being that if I really wanted to be found, then I would have given them my correct address at that time.

I never thought about them again after I moved to Israel. As wonderful as those university years were -- and they were all that and more -- it was part of my past.

Of course, that was before Facebook.

Thanks to Facebook and my need to put down just enough information to make me reasonably "findable" (I know that's not a word, but remember, my blog, my vocabulary) to old friends, some unwanted people found me as well.

I just realized that I have digressed so far from my point that I will have to take a bus to get back to it.

Okay, so I wrote back to Data Entry Debbie and she sent me a link so that I could become a member of the McMaster Alumni website. I should have just ignored her message, but my need to click a link wherever I find one was too strong to ignore. Next thing I knew I was at the "register to login" page and since it also had a link .... I started clicking again. I figured that I would just register. No one was actually going to come after me for money ... I live to far away. I'm inaccessible.

And then came the ironic moment. In fact, the MUA website was inaccessible because one of the first pieces of information they wanted was my student card number.

First I checked to see if that was an optional question but as it turned out, it was one of the questions with the little red asterik next to it, which means that it was compulsory. I just looked at it, and looked at it, and looked again.

As I see it, it was the hand of G-d slapping me back to reality. I think what He was saying was that He also doesn't want me to give money to McMaster; He would prefer that I do all my charitable giving in Israel.

My biggest problem is that I can't help but look a gift horse in the mouth. After a message straight from G-d you would think I had the sense to just move on to another web page, but noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, I have to have the last word (G-d also gave man free choice, and in my case, I don't always use it wisely). I wrote back to Data Entry Debbie and asked her who the heck remembered their student card number 28 years after graduation?

Now, I am just waiting for her response. If she responds that people actually do remember theirs, I will eat my hat. And then I will sit around and wait for my graduate school university to find me as well.

Facebook Subversion

Let me start by saying that I always wanted children.... before I had them.

I didn't get married until I was 32 and once that was done, I was focused on what I figured was the next logical step.... expanding my gene pool (isn't that what men usually say about their sperm?).

I think we can skip all the details about getting those children but suffice it to say that I ended up with three. One came with the husband. That gives me a total of four.

Now generally I would have to say that I am glad I had them, and always thought (despite my friends' protestations to the contrary) that they would get easier with age. My thinking was that if I could leave them alone in the house for a few minutes or not have to go with them to the bathroom, I would be essentially emancipated from the drudgery of motherhood. I can barely stop laughing long enough to continue this post, which is a nice way of saying I WAS WRONG!!!

Which leads me to the events of this past week. Last Friday night my 13-year-old son's friends were hanging around in a local parkette. I am not a big fan of pointless hanging around, but the kids don't see it that way at all. Let me start by saying that my son wasn't there. However, one of his friends apparently showed up with a bibi gun. At this point, it is obvious that the story is headed downhill.

Why he had the bibi gun is a fair and logical question, but it is really tangential to the story and even if it wasn't, I don't know the answer. What is important is that one of the 13-year-old girls who was there ended up with the gun and inadvertently (?) shot some other kid in the face. Fortunately, it was the other kid's cheek that suffered the brunt of the pelleting, but as you can imagine, that kid was less than amused.

Apparently (I wasn't there so I feel obliged to keep saying "apparently") the victim walked up to the shooter, grabbed the gun from her hands and proceeded to crush it to smithereens. That, in turn, led to further decline in the festivities. (No surprise there.)

Suffice it to say that there was name-calling, personal fashion insults, and so on.
Which leads me back to the kid who owned the gun.

When his parents found out about it, apparently (see above) they were pretty much non-plussed because (so I heard) it was only "boys being boys". I am always speechless when civilized people in the 21st century say stupid things like that. Where do you go from there?

Okay, so now, without being directly involved in any of the goings on, I realize that I am really peeved. And to add insult to injury, I hear that this gun-toting kid's older brother has a nasty home page on Facebook. Yes, the parents supposedly know about that too and yet again, are unphased for the same reasons as noted above. And me, I am just getting more and more peeved.

I went home and reported the entire series of events to Chaim because I knew I was preaching to the converted. That's when we decided to try to get on to the older brother's Facebook page to see if all the gossip was true. (As one of my friends later asked: "And what were you going to do with this knowledge?" I don't know, but at the time that wasn't the point.) We were trying to remember that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And if we couldn't, we were just going to have to go with our verdict of "Presumed Guilty".

This is when I learned a little something about the inner workings of Facebook. If you aren't invited to be someone's friend, you can't access their home page. And let's be honest here, there aren't many 15 year old boys inviting me to be their Facebook friend (not from lack of asking or even begging on my part).

When I told a friend about our attempts to access unfriendly Facebook pages she told me to call another mutual friend (who I cannot name here because I may need him again in the future) who is an unofficial (Facebook) Subversion expert.

When I talked to the Facebook Subverter he explained how complicated it could be to break into a Facebook page and that he (acting on behalf of my subconscious) decided that it was too much risk considering that my objectives weren't clear -- well, at least those beyond curiosity.

So, now, I am left to look at this kid and wonder if he is as creepy as I now think he is. He looks so innocent, but it's too late for that -- I have my suspicions. And I really want to have his parents sent to have their heads checked, but you can't go around insisting upon that in a democratic country.

And in the meantime, I am going to do everything in my power to keep my kids away from him/them.