Along the same vein of the last two posts, I have been exploring ways to capture some of my year of urban living in East Brunswick, NJ.
A major facet of this past year has been my bicycle (or rather, my bikes, since the first was stolen). I was on that two wheeler nearly every day. My first bike had a rack and a crate strapped to it. My second had a front basket. They both had high style and a propensity for getting flat tires, and I loved them.
Tonight I decided to bike to the Brunswick Square Mall, otherwise known as the pulsing heart of urban life in my hometown. I slung my computer over my shoulder, got on my dad's bike, and started on the 10-minute ride.
I went from my neighborhood, where colonial two-story homes sit on enormous lots, to the busy two-lane Summerhill Road, home to 7-Eleven and a grey and purple concrete slab that is a medical center. Then I hung a right on Rues Lane, where on one side there are more outsized homes and on the other, a technical college, and then the mall.
Being that I wasn't in a helmet, I tried to keep on the sidewalks. This was difficult since my town saw it fit to install sidewalks, but not connect them to the street with any sort of ramp. The bike across the mall parking lot to the doors of Barnes and Noble took nearly as long as the trip from my home to the lot entrance.
But the best part: I had told my mother I'd be home at around 7, and I wound up staying an hour longer. Sure enough, my mother drove to the mall to offer to spare me from the dangers of the East Brunswick roads and drive me home. I declined and made it home safely alone, although I will admit that a helmet, a light and something reflective are probably all good ideas.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Craigslist, for every phase of my life
Faced with the choice of either making productive strides towards making money, versus restarting my long-dormant relationship with Craigslist, today I chose option B and declared war on the clutter of my parents' home.
Note: this war did not include the years of personal rubble that is sitting in my bedroom closet.
I went into the Free section of Craigslist and began the breakup with a 14-year-old fish tank that has been out of commission for the last third of its tenure with our family. This is what I came up with:
Large fish tank with wrought iron stand
If you like displaying small gilled animals in captivity in your living room, have I got a fish tank for you.
It's a glass rectangular tank, 2 ft long, 1 ft wide, a foot and a half tall. It could use a cleaning, but otherwise the filter works fine. It comes on a wrought iron black stand, and it will make an attractive, living-room friendly home for your guppies or whatever other finned friends you decide to put in there. We stopped letting fish swim pointlessly in our home a few years ago, so if that sounds like something you'd like to do please collect the tank. It's yours.
##
I got about 20 posts within the day, including one from a guy who said "Swimming pointlessly in my living room? They can join me." By 7 pm it was out the door. Tomorrow: children's bicycle. I mean, getting some writing assignments.
I'll add here that I had a similarly rewarding experience in Tel Aviv when my landlord gave me an electric juicer I had no need for. It was an appliance created to satisfy no human need at all; think of a normal juicer, in which you manually squeeze half a lemon onto a cone that stands in the middle of a dish. Now imagine a machine doing this half as well and using electricity to do it. I went onto Agora.co.il, posted the machine, and was similarly availed of yet another useless jumble of plastic and metal.
Note: this war did not include the years of personal rubble that is sitting in my bedroom closet.
I went into the Free section of Craigslist and began the breakup with a 14-year-old fish tank that has been out of commission for the last third of its tenure with our family. This is what I came up with:
Large fish tank with wrought iron stand
If you like displaying small gilled animals in captivity in your living room, have I got a fish tank for you.
It's a glass rectangular tank, 2 ft long, 1 ft wide, a foot and a half tall. It could use a cleaning, but otherwise the filter works fine. It comes on a wrought iron black stand, and it will make an attractive, living-room friendly home for your guppies or whatever other finned friends you decide to put in there. We stopped letting fish swim pointlessly in our home a few years ago, so if that sounds like something you'd like to do please collect the tank. It's yours.
##
I got about 20 posts within the day, including one from a guy who said "Swimming pointlessly in my living room? They can join me." By 7 pm it was out the door. Tomorrow: children's bicycle. I mean, getting some writing assignments.
I'll add here that I had a similarly rewarding experience in Tel Aviv when my landlord gave me an electric juicer I had no need for. It was an appliance created to satisfy no human need at all; think of a normal juicer, in which you manually squeeze half a lemon onto a cone that stands in the middle of a dish. Now imagine a machine doing this half as well and using electricity to do it. I went onto Agora.co.il, posted the machine, and was similarly availed of yet another useless jumble of plastic and metal.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Suburbia, I have returned
My flight from Israel via London landed on Saturday morning, and after spending 13 hours sleeping fitfully at Heathrow airport I hit the ground running with a family outing to Manhattan.
This trip delayed the inevitable: confronting the fact that I grew up in a suburb nearly identical to most other suburbs in New Jersey and, for that matter, America. According to James Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere and other inspirational books, my parents' choice of living situation is "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world," and it has three possible futures: as materials salvage, as slums and as ruins.
Seeing that none of these great destinies has yet to be realized in East Brunswick, NJ, I instead came home to participate in the town's daily life.
I went to ShopRite, a large supermarket chain that includes many soggy and oddly frosted baked goods, as well as a raft of products whose ingredients I cannot pronounce. This trip was of course done by car. I also played with my dog, Chloe, who lords over a quarter acre of weedy backyard but has no canine friends to socialize with, because large yards negate the need for parks within walking distance. Then I joined my mother for Latin Dancing at the New York Sports Club, a gym chain for all the people who have cut out physical exercise from their service-sector jobs and must therefore pay to enter a building where they can sweat.
We have bikes stashed in our two-car garage but at the moment only one of four is accessible because the others are buried in the detritus of our existence or hanging from the ceiling, above a car, reachable only by ladder which is hanging on the wall and obstructed by power tools and extension cables. I have considered biking to a few places around town, but everything is far away and in the end I just stay at home throwing compost out in the backyard.
It must be said: I love everyone in my family and I am delighted to see them, but we live in one urban planning black hole.
This trip delayed the inevitable: confronting the fact that I grew up in a suburb nearly identical to most other suburbs in New Jersey and, for that matter, America. According to James Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere and other inspirational books, my parents' choice of living situation is "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world," and it has three possible futures: as materials salvage, as slums and as ruins.
Seeing that none of these great destinies has yet to be realized in East Brunswick, NJ, I instead came home to participate in the town's daily life.
I went to ShopRite, a large supermarket chain that includes many soggy and oddly frosted baked goods, as well as a raft of products whose ingredients I cannot pronounce. This trip was of course done by car. I also played with my dog, Chloe, who lords over a quarter acre of weedy backyard but has no canine friends to socialize with, because large yards negate the need for parks within walking distance. Then I joined my mother for Latin Dancing at the New York Sports Club, a gym chain for all the people who have cut out physical exercise from their service-sector jobs and must therefore pay to enter a building where they can sweat.
We have bikes stashed in our two-car garage but at the moment only one of four is accessible because the others are buried in the detritus of our existence or hanging from the ceiling, above a car, reachable only by ladder which is hanging on the wall and obstructed by power tools and extension cables. I have considered biking to a few places around town, but everything is far away and in the end I just stay at home throwing compost out in the backyard.
It must be said: I love everyone in my family and I am delighted to see them, but we live in one urban planning black hole.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Vote!
If you are an American reader living abroad, whether you have a Crush on Obama or you think it's Rainin' McCain, make sure your vote counts for more than just a YouTube hit. I just registered with the Overseas Vote Foundation, and I'm feeling pretty good about my citizenship.
Which reminds me...I'm leaving the country for a month at the end of next week, and it finally dawned on me that I have a heap of things to wrap up before I go - such as finding a subletter, booking a return flight and getting ready to move to Beer Sheva on my return. Should be pretty wild.
Which reminds me...I'm leaving the country for a month at the end of next week, and it finally dawned on me that I have a heap of things to wrap up before I go - such as finding a subletter, booking a return flight and getting ready to move to Beer Sheva on my return. Should be pretty wild.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
New Review on Green Prophet
And here is my latest book review...it's a review of Naomi Klein's No Logo, which I think starts strong but then turns into a screed. It also reminds me of when sweatshop labor was really a burning issue....ah, the good old pre-9/11 days!
The importance of being open
For a year and a half, the Israeli human rights organization B'tselem has been handing out Sony videocameras to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to document abuses by the settlers and soldiers. I'm writing about the project, called "Shooting Back," and so last Thursday I went to Susiya, an area of the West Bank south of Hebron to meet some of the Palestinians who have gotten the cameras. Susiya is the name for three separate, neighboring things - the Palestinian encampment, the Israeli settlement, and the ruins of an ancient Jewish community.
It was a surreal day; we were in Palestinian Susiya, a community of 30 families who live in half-built houses camouflaged as tents. This is accomplished by building a concrete wall about three feet high, then putting up metal bars and draping a large tarp over the whole structure. It is built similarly to a greenhouse, except with half-brick walls. From the inside, it feels like a real room; from the outside it looks like a flimsy black tent. The person I spoke to there says this tactic helps prevent the IDF from demolishing the structure as an illegally built home.
The interesting thing about Susiya is that although this is a community that is off the electric and water grids, where a corral of goats stands next to the pseudo-tents, five families there have learned to use Sony Handycam videocameras. They charge them with solar panels and then use the cameras to film the hills, from which they say Jewish settlers descend and attack them. The Susiya Palestinians have caught a few clips which gained press notoriety, including this one.
Interviewing the Palestinians who film was fascinating, as was seeing how people survive on a lonely hilltop where water must be trucked in and electricity is so limited that refrigerators and microwaves are all turned into storage space.
But what I also found eye-opening was the attitude of my traveling companion, a Jerusalemite named Shai who is active in the left-wing organizations who work in Susiya. We met up in the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, took a (government-subsidized) public bus to Kiryat Arba, which is just outside of Hebron, and from there took another (government-subsidized) public bus to the Israeli settlement of Susiya. We began walking along the road to Palestinian Susiya and our contact there picked us up. On our way back, we hitched rides through the West Bank until we returned to Jerusalem.
Shai had an easy-going attitude that I have found to be rare among passionate leftists. On our way to Hebron, we sat across the aisle from one of his classmates at Hebrew University, a woman who lives in the Migdal Oz settlement outside of Jerusalem. She and Shai kept a friendly banter, teasing each other about having to educate me with right and left wing views on Israel. On the way into the West Bank, Shai pointed out Arab villages, and his friend the sites of terrorist attacks.
As we walked onto the second bus, Shai saw a settler woman holding onto an adorable baby with giant eyes in a onesie, and he stopped to coo at him. The woman looked delighted to have someone take an interest in her kid.
Once we were in Susiya, Shai caught up with our host, whom he knows well, and played with his baby.
And as we hitched back, he started up conversations with our drivers, one of whom was an Israeli man using the West Bank as a shortcut between the desert town of Arad and Jerusalem, and the second who lived in a newly constructed settlement near Jerusalem.
It was refreshing to see someone like Shai connect with such wide-ranging elements of Israeli and Palestinian society. The story I wrote about Hebron was about how the left and right in Israel are so polarized they barely speak. This is hardly a recipe for national discussion on the future of the state, which desperately needs to happen so Israel can tie up the unfinished business in the West Bank, get permanent borders and move beyond tribal politics.
That's not to say that Shai isn't loyal to what he believes in; I met him two weeks ago at a protest in the West Bank put on by Combatants for Peace, an Israeli-Palestinian group devoted to nonviolent resolution of the conflict. He was part of a group of about 200 Israelis and Palestinians who stood on the side of a highway to agitate for freedom of movement for everyone in the West Bank (see above). But Shai showed me that there is room for openmindedness that transcends political opinions.
It was a surreal day; we were in Palestinian Susiya, a community of 30 families who live in half-built houses camouflaged as tents. This is accomplished by building a concrete wall about three feet high, then putting up metal bars and draping a large tarp over the whole structure. It is built similarly to a greenhouse, except with half-brick walls. From the inside, it feels like a real room; from the outside it looks like a flimsy black tent. The person I spoke to there says this tactic helps prevent the IDF from demolishing the structure as an illegally built home.
The interesting thing about Susiya is that although this is a community that is off the electric and water grids, where a corral of goats stands next to the pseudo-tents, five families there have learned to use Sony Handycam videocameras. They charge them with solar panels and then use the cameras to film the hills, from which they say Jewish settlers descend and attack them. The Susiya Palestinians have caught a few clips which gained press notoriety, including this one.
Interviewing the Palestinians who film was fascinating, as was seeing how people survive on a lonely hilltop where water must be trucked in and electricity is so limited that refrigerators and microwaves are all turned into storage space.
But what I also found eye-opening was the attitude of my traveling companion, a Jerusalemite named Shai who is active in the left-wing organizations who work in Susiya. We met up in the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, took a (government-subsidized) public bus to Kiryat Arba, which is just outside of Hebron, and from there took another (government-subsidized) public bus to the Israeli settlement of Susiya. We began walking along the road to Palestinian Susiya and our contact there picked us up. On our way back, we hitched rides through the West Bank until we returned to Jerusalem.
Shai had an easy-going attitude that I have found to be rare among passionate leftists. On our way to Hebron, we sat across the aisle from one of his classmates at Hebrew University, a woman who lives in the Migdal Oz settlement outside of Jerusalem. She and Shai kept a friendly banter, teasing each other about having to educate me with right and left wing views on Israel. On the way into the West Bank, Shai pointed out Arab villages, and his friend the sites of terrorist attacks.
As we walked onto the second bus, Shai saw a settler woman holding onto an adorable baby with giant eyes in a onesie, and he stopped to coo at him. The woman looked delighted to have someone take an interest in her kid.
Once we were in Susiya, Shai caught up with our host, whom he knows well, and played with his baby.
And as we hitched back, he started up conversations with our drivers, one of whom was an Israeli man using the West Bank as a shortcut between the desert town of Arad and Jerusalem, and the second who lived in a newly constructed settlement near Jerusalem.
It was refreshing to see someone like Shai connect with such wide-ranging elements of Israeli and Palestinian society. The story I wrote about Hebron was about how the left and right in Israel are so polarized they barely speak. This is hardly a recipe for national discussion on the future of the state, which desperately needs to happen so Israel can tie up the unfinished business in the West Bank, get permanent borders and move beyond tribal politics.
That's not to say that Shai isn't loyal to what he believes in; I met him two weeks ago at a protest in the West Bank put on by Combatants for Peace, an Israeli-Palestinian group devoted to nonviolent resolution of the conflict. He was part of a group of about 200 Israelis and Palestinians who stood on the side of a highway to agitate for freedom of movement for everyone in the West Bank (see above). But Shai showed me that there is room for openmindedness that transcends political opinions.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Hebron Story
Here's a link to an excerpt of my latest article, on Hebron. I covered the left and right-wing tourism to the city, which is 18 km southeast of Jerusalem in the West Bank.
Hebron is a strange place - it's a major Palestinian city, pop. 166,000 with a Jewish settlement of 1,000 right inside the city center. Since the Second Intifada, Jews and Palestinians have been forbidden from going inside each other's sections of the city, but there are thousands of Palestinian families who live in the Jewish section and can't walk, drive or open stores on parts of the street.
The left-wing groups, such as Breaking the Silence, emphasize the restrictions on the Palestinians. The settlers point out the fact that the Palestinians are terrorists who shoot at them and make it impossible to live in the city. They gloss over the fact that the tiny Jewish community in Hebron has disrupted the main North-South traffic artery, caused the closure of the central marketplace of the city and made a large permanent IDF presence necessary.
For the story, I went to Hebron three times - once with each group, and once alone. It was nearly impossible to hear the left-wing tour because the settlers protest it in force. When we first got into town, the settlers were so hostile that one woman stood in the women's public toilet and blocked off one of the stalls, just to make us wait longer to use the restroom.
On the right-wing tour I kept noticing men in sidelocks covered in dust pushing wheelbarrows, because the settlers believe in "Jewish Labor" - as in, not employing any Arabs.
And when I went alone, I snapped pictures for a few minutes before two police officers demanded to see my identity and looked at me warily, saying "I know your face, you've been here a lot before," despite the fact that that day was only my second time in town.
This was my first political story this year - as opposed to environmental - and it really sucked the lifeblood out of me. I didn't wash dishes or do laundry for about two weeks. But there was something very exciting about talking to Orit Struk, the head of the Jewish settlement's legal department, and then hanging up and getting on the phone with Yehuda Shaul, one of the most outspoken critics of Israeli policy in Hebron. This is really the magic of being a journalist - you can have access to people who never talk to one another, and you can get a thorough understanding by listening to both sides.
Hebron is a strange place - it's a major Palestinian city, pop. 166,000 with a Jewish settlement of 1,000 right inside the city center. Since the Second Intifada, Jews and Palestinians have been forbidden from going inside each other's sections of the city, but there are thousands of Palestinian families who live in the Jewish section and can't walk, drive or open stores on parts of the street.
The left-wing groups, such as Breaking the Silence, emphasize the restrictions on the Palestinians. The settlers point out the fact that the Palestinians are terrorists who shoot at them and make it impossible to live in the city. They gloss over the fact that the tiny Jewish community in Hebron has disrupted the main North-South traffic artery, caused the closure of the central marketplace of the city and made a large permanent IDF presence necessary.
For the story, I went to Hebron three times - once with each group, and once alone. It was nearly impossible to hear the left-wing tour because the settlers protest it in force. When we first got into town, the settlers were so hostile that one woman stood in the women's public toilet and blocked off one of the stalls, just to make us wait longer to use the restroom.
On the right-wing tour I kept noticing men in sidelocks covered in dust pushing wheelbarrows, because the settlers believe in "Jewish Labor" - as in, not employing any Arabs.
And when I went alone, I snapped pictures for a few minutes before two police officers demanded to see my identity and looked at me warily, saying "I know your face, you've been here a lot before," despite the fact that that day was only my second time in town.
This was my first political story this year - as opposed to environmental - and it really sucked the lifeblood out of me. I didn't wash dishes or do laundry for about two weeks. But there was something very exciting about talking to Orit Struk, the head of the Jewish settlement's legal department, and then hanging up and getting on the phone with Yehuda Shaul, one of the most outspoken critics of Israeli policy in Hebron. This is really the magic of being a journalist - you can have access to people who never talk to one another, and you can get a thorough understanding by listening to both sides.
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