Yom Haatzmaut 2012

So tonight is Yom Haatzmaut, Israeli independence day.  Sixty-four years, we’ve been around.  Makes me feel like we should start renting cottages on the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear.

Things haven’t been that great with me recently, and my plans kind of changed at the last minute so I’m not really doing anything this year.  But I figured, at the very least, I should walk around to the streets that they’ve blocked off to car traffic, over to the square where they set up a stage for various singers.

It’s kind of like the Fourth of July.  You’ve got folding tables with a bunch of cheap, vaguely patriotic-looking balloons or noisemakers.  You’ve got kids running around spraying something that vaguely resembles shaving cream.  You’ve got the vague scent of people grilling on a barbecue that’s going to be even stronger tomorrow.  And, of course, fireworks.

But somehow, wandering through this mass of people, these bodies flowing down the street like a river, it just reminded me of the kinds of things I wrote about here the other day, how despite my efforts I still don’t really fit in here.  That, while I’m glad this country is still around, and while for now I’m glad I’m here, I’m not really sure why.  If I look at my direct surroundings, can I identify with even one of the thousands of people sharing street space with me?  If I look at the country as a whole, is there a single national leader that I can respect?  Am I even a part of the culture here, or just a blue person in a story that’s supposed to take place in a green world?

But then I decided that I shouldn’t be thinking like that.  Not on Yom Haatzmaut.  Maybe on Friday or sometime thereafter, but not tonight and not tomorrow.  There has to be something I can feel good about in this country.  If I can’t stand the Mizrachi music that this particular fellow seems to insist on singing off-key, if I can’t stand the kid who just accidentally sprayed my leg with faux shaving cream, if I can’t stand the fact that I don’t even have anyone to turn to and say “wow, this is ridiculous,” then I’ll have to find something else to be proud of.  Something that I can say “this is a part of the country that I understand, that I like, and that is as integral to the country’s identity as it is to my own.”

Memrach HaShachar.

That’s right.  Memrach HaFucking Shachar.  For those of you who don’t know, Memrach HaShachar is an easily-spreadable chocolate cream that comes in a plastic tub which you’d, for example, put on bread like jam.  Except it’s not jam.  It’s chocolate.

Some of you may be thinking “oh, it’s like Nutella.”  You’d be wrong, though.  Nutella is a derivative.  It’s an offshoot of Memrach HaShachar.  It doesn’t spread as well as Memrach Shachar, it doesn’t *quite* taste like chocolate, and you pay more for a jar that holds less.  No, Nutella is what happens when someone tries to fix something that ain’t broke.  It’s like Microsoft Bob.

But Memrach HaShachar.  It’s absolutely ubiquitous in this country.  It’s been around almost as long as the state, and is as likely to be found in the sandwich of a kid’s bag lunch as cold cuts are.  It’s a staple food.  The army’s come up with its own version that goes into field rations.  I’m told that there was a time they tried to update their product’s logo, and people revolted all New Coke-style.

This is it.  This is my reason to be proud of this country.  We didn’t just come up with this ostensibly goofy, yet somehow amazing product, we goddamn mainstreamed it too.  No matter what else goes wrong, no matter what happens, Memrach HaShachar will always be my connection to this country, will always be my reason to be proud, even if I’m not entirely feeling it.

Memrach Hashachar, I thank and salute you.

How to Write an Original Story

This is a process that I thought of as a result of a recent comment I made on Facebook.  This is a flawless method to consistently produce completely original works.

Step 1)

Take a pre-existing story.  Embellish it, adding elements and removing elements, but maintaining the same basic plot outline.

EXAMPLE (Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”):

There’s a girl named… uh… her name is Mariel, right? But she’s a mer–, uh, zombie. Right, a merzombie who’s in love with a prince named… Merrick. Merrick, however, is a hu–, er he’s a huge cyclops, and the cyclops is the natural enemy of the merzombie, so their love can never be. So Mariel goes to see the mer-sea-zombie-witch, who casts a spell turning her into a cylops for three, wait no, for FOUR days, in which time she has to get Merrick to ki– I mean, to kill Odysseus, or else she turns back into a merzombie forever.

Step 2)

Take another pre-existing story.  Repeat.

EXAMPLE (Disney’s “Aladdin”):

Baladdin is a street ra- er, a street rapper who falls in love with a pri- um, a priestess.  Now, a priestess and a street rapper can’t co-mingle, obviously.  It’s not acceptable.  So Baladdin goes out in search of the magic la- um, the magic llama, which holds the magic… beanie.  The beanie will give whoever holds the llama three, er, fishes.  Baladdin uses the fishes to make himself look like a prince.  I mean, to make himself look like the artist formerly known as Prince, and uses this disguise to win the heart of the priestess.

Step 3)

Make her open the box.  Wait, that doesn’t sound right.  Let me try again.

Step 3)

Remove all elements from the original stories.  Combine what remains.  Elements common to both stories can stay, for some reason.

EXAMPLE:

There once was a rapping zombie who fell in love with a cyclops priestess, but their love could never be.  The rapping zombie then set out to find the zombie llama that possessed a magic beanie that gave him four fishes.  The rapping zombie used these fishes to convince the cyclops priestess to hunt down and kill Odysseus.  While she was doing this, the zombie serenaded her with songs by the artist formerly known as Prince, winning her heart.

I just want to note: I said it would be an original story.  I didn’t make any guarantees that it would be good.

Contemplations

I’ve been having this conversation with myself for a while, and intermittently with other people, too, but I feel like I need to open this up.  Maybe turning this into a “general knowledge” problem among my friends will help me.  Maybe it won’t.  Who knows.

Increasingly over the last six months or so, I’ve felt like there is less and less of a role for me in Israel.  My plan was “get out of the army, spend a year trying to figure something out here, and if I don’t, then it’s time to look overseas.”

It’s been less than three months since my service ended, but I’m already hitting a wall.  I’m just not gaining any traction in anything.  I can’t find an apartment that I can afford in the area I want to live, I can’t find a job that I can feel good about, and even the ones I feel bad about are hard to come by, and slowly all of the doors I’d planned to look into have closed before my face.

It’s a really difficult decision to come to.  More difficult by orders of magnitude than the decision to move here in the first place.  It would mean admitting that whatever I wanted to accomplish by moving here didn’t work out, that I’d failed, that the State of Israel isn’t the right place for me.  It would mean saying goodbye to some really good friends before I even really got to know a lot of them.  Isn’t it a bit ridiculous?  I’d be saying goodbye to more good friends from a school I never attended, none of whom I’ve known for more than a year and a half, than I did when I left the house I’d lived in through elementary, middle, and high school.

But probably most importantly, leaving Israel would mean jumping headlong into a situation with no definition at all, almost out of necessity.  Sure, as of now there’s a nice two-story suburban house that I could probably live in rent-free waiting for me in Florida, and sure it’s walking distance from two shopping centers and biking distance from one of the biggest malls in the country, but I’ve been there before.  I know what’s there and what I can make from it.  It’s a stepping stone at best.  I’d have to find a way to carve a whole new life from somewhere among those three hundred million people, and that’s fairly intimidating.

But I need to move forward.  And I don’t know if I can do that by staying in a place where I keep hitting brick walls, where I’ve managed to live for six years without developing a single employable skill, where I can’t manage to get my act together regardless of how much effort I put into it.

I wish there was a magic wand that could just come and solve one of my problems.  Not all of them.  Just one.  That someone out there would just magically appear and say “I want to give you a job, and it involves writing and marketing!”  Or give me an apartment.  Or hand me a contract and say “if you promise to do A, B, and C, you will receive X, Y, and Z, no catches.”  Just some element of stability somewhere in my life, or even the promise of stability.

I’m suddenly reminded of the first post I ever wrote on this blog.  Maybe it’s time for me to get on that train.

Not-Quite-Meditation

It’s difficult to focus on a lot of things at the same time.  A lot of people do it, and a lot of people do it well, but it’s difficult.  I don’t know how they do it, but I assume it has to do with compartmentalization: a person may be working on four things at a time, but when they’re doing one of them, they shut out the others.  It’s time management, and it’s staying focused on the task at hand.  I’ve never been really good at either of those things.

There used to be a time when I could meditate.  I couldn’t focus on one thing, but I could focus on nothing, clear my head, and start back from square one.  But that’s difficult too.  It takes energy.  You have to do it before you absolutely need it, or else it’s no good, like trying to heal a party member in a game after he’s lost all his hit points.  No hit points, nothing to heal.

I’m not going to talk about what’s been going on with me for the last two months.  Some of you know the whole story because I’ve been telling it to you as it happens, and some of you know a good chunk of the story because it’s been affecting the whole family, and maybe I’ll tell that story on this blog at some point when I’ve got somewhat of a better sense of humor about it.  For the purposes of this post, the only thing you really need to know is that, running with the metaphor above, I reached zero hit points quite a while ago.

Meditation is an exercise where you block everything out, and think about nothing.  Failing that, you think about as few things as possible.  The easiest way to think about one thing is to focus on a color, possibly white.  If you can’t hold on to that on its own, you maybe move on to some free association, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.  And then Zuul manifests said mascot as a giant monster attacking New York.  But the point is to have your mind be as passive as you can manage.

You need to be able to focus for that, ignore outside distractions.  If you can’t do that on your own, you remove as many distractions as possible.  Removing all distractions goes too far for me: my mind’s really good at wandering, and I’m not good at controlling it.

And that’s how I ended up in a movie theater by myself.  Just four black walls and a movie screen.  No friends to talk to, no digital distractions.  Just me, my chair, and “The Hunger Games.”

When I’m in moods like this, movies and TV shows have a tendency to trigger things they normally wouldn’t, both positive and negative.  The first time I saw “The Incredibles” was right after I’d gotten my sister and two of her friends, who were 12, 11, and 6 at the time, into a car accident, and so the airplane explosion scene with the screaming kids hit me harder than anything I can remember since the first time I saw “The Land Before Time” when I was five and cried when Little Foot was reunited with his grandparents.  On the other side of the spectrum, I started watching “House MD” after an experience that involved me being in a lot of hospitals, and anything that didn’t exactly reflect my experiences got me unreasonably upset at the very existence of the show.

But “The Hunger Games.”  I can’t remember a more bi-polar movie experience.  Some scenes got me upset because “things just don’t happen that way, and I know because I’ve been going through something similar.”  Some scenes had me feeling exactly how the filmmakers wanted me to, perhaps even moreso.  Other scenes had me giggling when I’m sure the intent was the opposite.  But to be fair, Douglas Adams, the number “eleven” said with a Scottish accent, and Westley and Buttercup’s journey through the Fire Swamp have as much to do with that last one as anything.

Oh right, and the fact that the baker is apparently named “Pita.”  Thank you, Hebrew subtitles.

It was kind of a waste of a movie.  I didn’t enjoy it as a movie, I just utilized it as therapy.  Like eating fancy ravioli when you just need some comfort food and you’d do just as well to have some macaroni and cheese.  In any other mood I probably would have enjoyed it for what it was supposed to be, aside from the first ten minutes or so which I felt were basically an awkward justification for the scenarios that played out in the rest of the movie.  But as it stands, it may as well have been macaroni and cheese.

Which, sometimes, can be just as important.

S’a Weird Day

I sit here right now typing from a cafe in Herzliya.  It’s a familiar cafe.  I walked through the doors and my eyes were immediately drawn to the tables that are close to electrical outlets, because in Herzliya, the most important thing in a cafe has always been being able to plug in your laptop.

It’s been a while since I’ve been in Herzliya.  It’s weird.  A lot of stores have closed, or opened.  A building that was under construction is now complete.   But today is my “make sure I have money so I can let myself spend some of it” day, which means I have to be here in Herzliya.

It’s a weird day.  I knew I had to wake up early in order to get here in time to get things done, so I tried to go to sleep early.  But all that did was make me not fall asleep at all.  I should have known better.  On the plus side, I got a bunch of writing done (not for this blog, but if you ask nicely in real life I’ll email you the work-in-progress).

But I’m kinda sleepwalking through today, and wondering if there were any good off-campus places to sleep in Herzliya when it was raining out.  Don’t get me wrong: I’ve already got a lot of important things done even though I’m only semi-conscious.  Just, this is a really weird mood to be in.  Particularly when revisiting an old haunt.

The main street in Herzliya, for those not familiar, is Sokolov.  I did a decent bit of wandering up and down Sokolov today, poking into stores, looking for something with an overhang.  At one point I got fairly close to the office of my former landlord.  It’s a glass-front office, so he’d be able to see me from the street.

“But ah,” I assured myself, “you’re no longer a soldier, so he probably won’t recognize you out of uniform.”  And only after that thought completes does it occur to me that the last time the guy saw me, I wasn’t a soldier yet.  ”No, wait,” I tell myself, “I’ve grown my beard out and let my hair go scruffy!”  Again, the thought then occurs to me that that’s precisely how I looked the last time he saw me.

Finally I just decided that after almost three years, he’s probably forgotten me, and I got over it.

And then I made my way over to one of the four or five cafes that are collectively responsible for about half of the papers I wrote in college.

S’a weird day.

Webcomics: Roomies!/It’s Walky!, part 1

I’ll get to a Part 2 for Angel Moxie, but I’m already about halfway through the archives for the next comic on my list, which is technically a five-comic multiverse, two comics of which are currently running, and one comic of which is mostly behind a pay barrier.

So this is about the remaining two comics: Roomies! and It’s Walky!  Links are to the first pages of the respective comics.  David Willis first started developing the universe that these stories take place in, as I understand it, when he was eight years old.  Roomies! was a comic about college life that he drew for his college newspaper, and then he slowly started adding elements of older stories he’d thought up and taking things in a more sci-fi direction, until after three years the pretense was removed entirely and Willis simply changed the title of the comic.

I was going to start summarizing some of the more important plot elements of the story, going over some of the more interesting characters, but that’s not really the way I should tell this story.  The way I need to tell this story is by telling you how I came to read these two comics.

Let’ go way back to the Spring of 2005, and talk about something that has nothing to do with webcomics for a moment: Bob Dylan.

My high school musical tastes were pretty much dominated by Billy Joel, the Beatles, and a smattering of Simon and Garfunkel.  I wanted to expand my tastes, but I didn’t like listening to radio, so I went and bought CDs from artists I’d heard about and wanted to learn more.  One day roaming through Best Buy attracted me to a boxed set of Dylan albums: Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, and Time out of Mind.

Now, the way I liked to listen to music was to learn the whole album.  I did this by listening to it, almost to the exclusion of all other music, for at least a few days at a time, and sometimes up to a month.  And so I started, one by one, with these three discs.  For two weeks, Blonde on Blonde was in the CD player of my car, and was playing whenever I drove.

Until, of course, the accident.

The details of my car accident aren’t too important, but what is important is that A) I didn’t get Blonde on Blonde out of the player, B) that I got the day off of work, and C) I really needed something to lift my spirits, because car accidents ain’t fun.

An online buddy of mine (incidentally, a guy from the Angel Moxie forums) had suggested a comic that was just ending at the time called It’s Walky!, so with a lot of free time on my hands, I plopped down at my desk, put Blood on the Tracks into my computer, and spent a full weekend reading through those archives.

And that’s how I figured out that Blood on the Tracks, particularly in the later parts, is an incredibly moving soundtrack for this comic.

More talk about the actual content to come later.

Webcomics: Angel Moxie, Part 1

I’ve been wanting to blog about webcomics for almost as long as I’ve been posting to this blog, and I’ve never gotten around to it, for a couple reasons.  But one of the goals I set for myself after leaving the army was to read through the archives of a couple of my favorites, because that’s something I used to enjoy doing a lot but wasn’t able to while serving, and this gives me a really good opportunity to talk about them.

Before I start, the “Part 1″ in the title refers to the fact that I’m probably going to write a second post, not to chapters in the comic.

Angel Moxie, which I invite you to read from the first strip here, was written and drawn by Dan Hess.  And it was not my first webcomic.  That honor would go to 8-bit Theater.  It was not my second webcomic either.  Pretty sure that was Penny Arcade.  It wasn’t my third: that would be Mac Hall.  I’m fairly certain that Angel Moxie was the fourth webcomic I found and began to read, way back in 10th grade.

But it was the first webcomic that I was a fan of.  I was an active member on the forums, I came up with ridiculous theories about the future plot, and while it was updating, it was one of the things I most looked forward to in my day.  I don’t remember exactly where I entered the story, but it was somewhere around the end of the first major arc or the beginning of the second.

When I started reading Angel Moxie, it was a guilty pleasure comic.  The tagline is “Magic, Monsters and Junior High.”  It’s about three 11 year-old girls.  The site layout is (and if I remember correctly was initially even more blatantly so) predominantly pink and teal.  And I was a 15 year-old guy full of 15 year-old insecurities, despite what I used to tell myself.  But there was a certain development that knocked off the word “guilty,” and made this comic simply a great strip that I enjoyed.

The rest of this post is going to focus on a character that had a much larger presence in the comic than his panel count would indicate, and it’s going to have some spoilers.

The first storyline of Angel Moxie introduced your core cast and established the conflict.  You had Alex O’Connor, the main character, Riley Rosenbaum, her best friend, and Miyaneko Gato, their feline guide/mentor.  Then you had Tristan Stallings, who was a new girl in town, kind of a loner, and apparently had no qualms about helping out a mysterious pair of floating eyes, which eventually turned out to be Vashi, a demon general in the evil army of Lord Yzin.

To sum up the first hundred comics or so succinctly: Alex got magical powers, Riley investigated them, Vashi tricked Tristan into breaking three mystical seals so that she could break into our dimension, then once she was free, Tristan punched her to China.  Miya did a lot of yelling.

A character-developing interlude involving a robot, an undercover cop, and a hoarder of “Precious Moments” figurines later, and Vashi has freed the second demon general, which leads us to the second main story arc and, ba-bada-baaaa…

The introduction of Mr. Grant Kyokasho!

Mr. K was a very mysterious character, from his first appearance to his last, because he was generally always keeping secrets from everybody, though sometimes fairly poorly.  He’s also one of the main reasons I went from “I like this comic” to “this comic is amazing.”

In Mr. K we had the first major male character in the story, and he was ridiculously cool.  He was a dork, but the very best kind of dork.  And because of the interactions between the two, he suddenly made Riley, “the smart one,” the most interesting character in the cast, which “the smart one” rarely gets to be.  Regardless of the situation, Mr. K was always calm, always smiling, and completely unflappable.  Okay, so there was this one time when he was flapped.  But he created the first emotional highpoint of the comic.  The next paragraph is just solid spoilers.

The second major story arc comes to a climax as Candi Shugari, the second demon general in disguise, invites the three heroines to an evil slumber party, seals off their powers, and then sends a giant bunny minion to attack them.  Mr. K and Miya get there just in time, but can’t really do much.  Mr. K decides to help.  Then he decides to kill himself.  As a result he causes Riley to have an emotional breakdown that returns her powers to her, and she kills the hell out of Candi.

This encounter did a lot of things.  Up until this point, the comic had been a fairly straight spoof of Sailor Moon-type shows and stories, with a bit of Western culture thrown in.  Here we have the story taking on a life of its own, showing that it can be serious, and telling us that, despite the often goofy humor, bad things can happen in this world.  It set the stage for a lot of the conflict that happened in the second half of the comic, and it also represents somewhat of a turning point in the art.  Dan started using more complex drawings to portray more complex emotions.

And this was the moment where I got hooked on webcomics in general.  It went from something to amuse me on a day-to-day basis, to following a story in real-time, as it was being written.  Still today, while I follow some gag-a-day comics, almost all of the ones that I count among my favorites are rooted in an overarching story and plot, and almost all of them have moments like Mr. Kyokasho’s.

But more on those as I get to them.