Looking Back at 2009:
2009 was a rough year for me and for most of my friends. In all honesty, I’m glad it’s over.
It’s not that rough years are bad. Rough years can teach you (or remind you) how self sufficient you really are. They honestly build character. They teach you how to get through things, calmly, quietly, and efficiently. They’re important. However, being important doesn’t mean they’re pleasant.
This year I was robbed twice in a row; I lost everything of value except for my Hiking gear. They left some other things that they wouldn’t consider of value (like my crochet hook and yarn) and other things they didn’t see (my clarinet). Thankfully my iPod was in my messenger bag which was with me at the time.
It’s charming to be paying off a bank loan for a laptop I no longer own, but it is what it is. The financial loss was – and remains – significant. However, I’m making due, I have a roof over my head, and a job with job security until the end of my tour of duty.
Rather than reflect on the bad, I’d rather reflect on the good as I move on – joyfully, calmly, and expectantly – into 2010.
This past year I further defined my position in the IDF Ground Forces Foreign Relations Branch. I got to stand on a tank while doing field work after an all-nighter with an incredibly appreciative battalion commander. It was my job to prepare him and his staff for their presentation at a live-fire demonstration in front of a foreign army the next day. I succeeded. For my work in the Foreign Relations Branch I was awarded a Certificate of Excellence by the Ground Forces Chief of Staff (a Brigadier General) which was pretty neat.
My Hebrew has improved by leaps and bounds (though admittedly not as fast or as much as I would like it to have improved). I, in an incredibly strange turn of events, have found a love for learning Hebrew Grammar (my area in Linguistics is Applied Linguistics and Sociolinguistics…I’ve always left Grammar as an area of study to people who wore jackets with pads on the elbows and I never enjoyed studying English Grammar in depth…it’s the one thing I hate teaching most…but life is funny that way).
I went camping quite a few times (though I didn’t go hiking as much as I wanted to, compromise is a part of life and that’s the way it goes sometimes). I had the pleasure of visiting my first Kibbutz (Ma’agan Michael) many times to say hello to both my cows and to my friends who still call Ma’agan Michael home and spent many a night falling asleep on the beach.
December 27, 2009 I celebrated my second anniversary in Israel. It’s hard to imagine that it’s been two years already, the time has just flown by (I remember getting picked up by
nir1 after I landed and heading for coffee as if it were just yesterday; though I miss having nir1 around as if he’s been gone for decades).
I spent thirty wonderful days in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Buffalo, and West Palm Beach visiting my family and friends who I have missed beyond words.
I realized this year that most (if not all) of the friends that I’ve made in Israel didn’t know I had hobbies. I discovered the reason for this was because I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants since landing (Ulpan on Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, Moving to Tel-Aviv, Basic Training, Moving to Kibbutz Zikim, Serving in the IDF) that I haven’t had the time, or the place, to do any of them (it’s been two years of wonderful exhaustion).
I’ve taken the words of Rabbi Hillel to heart recently and have stopped saying “when I have time” (since I may never have it) and have just started to do them again…and it’s been more stress-relieving than anything you can find in any pill.
Forward to 2010 and Beyond:
2010 will be another incredibly active year. My priorities for this year, however, are my family, my friends, and myself. I look forward to a healthier year, I look forward to a year filled with more laughter, with more days spent at the beach, and with just a little bit more hiking and camping in between. I look forward to a year of writing, emailing, blogging and staying in touch with my pen-pals who have been beyond patient with me.
This year I want a year of just enough: just enough food, just enough money, just enough opportunities, just enough luck. I look forward to creating and studying and learning every day throughout the year.
I’ll be finishing the army in 533 days since some very speshul bureaucratic snowflakes who manage the budget for the IDF Ground Forces Foreign Relations Branch couldn’t possibly understand why they would need to create a line item in the budget to retain a linguist and ESL teacher on the FRB staff (I’m their only linguist…since mostly, like all other areas of the army, they’re staffed by 18-21 year old conscripts). However, of the 533 days only 337 are days that are actually spent on base. It’s actually even less than 337 days since while that number does take into account my two, 30 day trips to the United States over the next two years it doesn’t take into account my 30 free-floating vacation days over the next two years, nor does it take into account ‘fun days,’ trips with the army, etc.
By the time I finish my service in the IDF I’ll have served somewhere around six times the required amount of service for someone who immigrated at my age. I’ll be leaving the army (providing everything goes the way it should) as a Staff Sergeant which is something I can also be okay with. This isn’t how I wanted to end this position, not on the terms that I wanted to end this position, but it’s not always up to me.
The opportunity for my commander to make me an Academic Officer (the requirements of which I surpass by miles) sadly fell through (due to the aforementioned bureaucratic snowflakes). I don’t take the decision personally. The ever growing pile of recommendation forms and letters that I receive from my students after each course also lets me know that the decision wasn’t based on any professional shortcomings on my end.
In all fairness, I was offered the opportunity to go to the Officers School for Human Resources but the offer wasn’t tempting enough to make me want to give up my position in the Foreign Relations Branch. I love what I do at the FRB, I love who I work with and to ask me to give up meeting armies from around the world and teaching Brigadier Generals, Colonels and on down the rank to Private, to ask me to give up doing fieldwork, to ask me to give up all this to then go and do nothing more than count vacation days wasn’t worth it.
I complete my tour of duty on June 19, 2011 happy for having had the opportunity to serve my country, thankful that I was able to fight myself into a position where I was able to make a difference instead of being handed the keys to a truck and being shoved aside as all too many immigrants are in the IDF. I know I will leave a much better person for serving. I have given (and will continue) to give a lot to the IDF and I have learned (and will continue to learn) a lot throughout the remainder of my service.
After I finish I’ll be accepting a teaching position somewhere to pay off any residual debt incurred from serving in the army (I make about $196.00US a month and even with living a very, very mellow lifestyle it falls far short of meeting my requirements). After a few years of teaching and living like a pauper I look forward to getting back on course and traveling, taking a slew of language courses in both Hebrew and Arabic before entering Graduate School and working on my MA in Israel so I can afford to work on my Ph.D. in the United States.
Still incredibly important to me is to travel and write; it still doesn’t matter to me if I have to finance that by working in a kitchen, washing dishes, doing construction, washing floors. There are too many countries to see, too many people to meet. I just have to work it in with my career track and balance it with my (oddly growing) desire to create some kind of family.
“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”
I love to sew. I mean, I really really love to sew. After seeing a meme posted by
angeltorcida in handmade_gifts I now have a wonderful group of people to make things for.
I love what I do…sure…you could be the President of the United States…an Astronaut…Doctor…Spelunker…but it can never quite compare to how amazing it is to work with languages. It’s not that I’m biased, but I quite clearly have the best job in the known universe.
That said, as creative as I get to be on a daily basis…I realized that I also need to do something tactile, and creative in a different way to de-stress and work a different kind of creativity in my mind. While I don’t see myself ever ‘sewing professionally’ so to speak, you can certainly expect to see an Etsy store in short order…along with a table at craft fairs, and maybe an Artist Alley or two in the future.
Free gifts will continue to flow. I’ll be doing the five free gifts meme at least once every two months (to make sure I have projects to work on at work on slow days or while traveling). I’ll do it more or less depending on how quickly I get projects done.
Daily (or near daily) blogging should now once again be taken for granted which means that
ladymaidmarian should start working out and stretching her page-down finger…I’d hate for her to pull something…I haven’t been posting as much as I used to and her page down finger may be out of practice… 😉
Okay, time for bed.
moocowinthecity 
