Waking up in Michigan

The long wait for visas continues. Hope is alive and well, and she's tentatively scheduled us a flight to Tel Aviv for September 6th, but she has her fingers crossed and she keeps checking her phone so I'm not really sure how to read that behavior. But we're optimistic! And we sternly, semi-confidently expect visas to arrive before September.

In the meantime, we've ventured to Michigan, where we're staying at a fancy Jesuit retreat center that frequently plays host to various church groups and band camps. (Sweaty band kids keep stealing our table.) ("Sweaty sousaphonist" is a term I wanted to use just then, but then I would be making assumptions about what instruments the various sweaty children play, and that's a problem. You can't sacrifice your integrity for a cheap joke Michael, especially when you're not even sure that's the proper term for a musician who specializes in the use of the sousaphone.)

But besides the adorable children visibly struggling their way through primary school (bless them), I really enjoy the random pictures of Pope Francis scattered about the facility (bless him), and I have much appreciation for the copious amounts of complementary coffee of questionable quality (BLESS IT, I guess).

It's definitely a little anti-climactic to be sitting here in Michigan after a week of orientation, rather than getting to actually get going, but I'm trying to see it as an exercise in patience.

And it's not like we don't have plenty of orientating and preparation to do for our time in the Holy Land anyway? With our team of volunteers and our humble coordinators we've already started diving more deeply into the history of the region -- so we should be all read up and ready to go in a couple more life-times of careful study and analysis. (Which at least means we won't be running out of things to do anytime soon.)

Then there's the whole language learning thing! I've been producing spit, phlegm, and gaspy wheezes all summer in anticipation of learning Arabic, but it's helping surprisingly little. Apparently there's a little more to it than that? It's actually a pretty beautiful and complex language and it's a lot of fun. But yes, there is a lot of spitting.

Our first vaguely on topic Middle East venture for orientation was a casual trip to the Oriental Institute in Chicago last Wednesday (after the other YAGM volunteers started catching flights). I say "vaguely," because how relevant is the history of the Hittites and the Assyrians to the Middle East today? Also because the whole "oriental" label is a little iffy for me, in a "what-does-that-really-mean?" sort of way. (For me it was more of a museum about western archaeologists and their conclusions about Sumerian trade routes than a museum about the Sumerians themselves -- if you know what I mean.)

But whatever. Life goes on and learning continues.

Michael goes overseas! Or really, actually, to Chicago. And soon to Michigan. Heh.

Hi!

For those of you wandering idly through this puzzling piece of blogmanship trying to verify that it is in fact the site from which I, Michael, will be blogging from and about Jerusalem for a year:

Yes.  It is.

I can’t promise I’ll stay entirely on topic – so don’t be too surprised if you catch some weird tangents about terrifying high fashion department stores in urban Germany, classy horror-filled clothing boutiques in French cities, or any of a wide variety of numerous other topics I might end up on that have little or nothing to do with scary clothing outlets in Europe. (I'll be writing newsletters occasionally that will be a lot more direct and to the point in terms of letting you know what I'm doing.)

Usually hopefully the tangents will have a point, potentially relating to the issues and events more immediately at hand. The point of this most recent tangent being that I’ve seen Abercrombie & Fitch outlets in Paris and Dusseldorf, and they were something out of an Orwellian nightmare tinged with high school nostalgia and dripping with a noxious cocktail of musk, matching tight shirts, and peer pressure.

It was dark, there were more random staircases than I knew what to do with, and identically dressed store employees kept popping out of random dark corners with perfectly-styled hair and eerie German-accented unison choruses of “Can I help you?” It was like a dimly lit alien museum full of a very limited range of confiscated Earth artifacts – namely, tight, over-priced teenager clothes.

I wanted to feel bad for the imitation-human creatures apparently forced into servitude as robotic tour guides by their cruel Martian overseers, but I got the feeling they were far beyond the reach of sympathy by this point. (I guess the real question is why are the alien masters so fond of Abercrombie & Fitch? Perhaps unresolved middle school traumas and anxieties? Or more likely the outrageously over-perfumed ventilation shafts are easily adapted for larva incubation purposes.

Anyway.

I don’t really have much to talk about yet, so I reverted to talking about other things to give you a little bit of content. I’m just gonna forget for now about all the other things I said I was gonna talk about on this blog in the past, but watch out for random unexpected jaunts into the past throughout the next year! (Maybe they’ll be more relevant? It will be a journey of discovery for all of us.)

I’ve officially left my sticky, humid home in the South, and am now in Chicago. Will be here for a week for various types of orientating, and then I’ll be moving on to Michigan for two weeks of more Jerusalem-specific orientating as we wait for visas to arrive. Hah.

Oh gosh, do I sign off? I don't know even normal blogging protocol all that well, let alone when you have piles of people you're specifically writing for and to.

Um,

Michael.