NOLA

Alright now that Hell Week has passed I can get back to the other important things in this world.

My trip to New Orleans. And what a trip!

Such a beautiful city, such a tragedy. Don't get me wrong the French Quarter looks great, you wouldn't know that there had been flooding there just 2 years ago. But then you venture into what was the "poorer" , less touristy areas, like the Lower 9th Ward and you can see the lasting damage caused by Katrina. On our first day we went on a bus tour of the effected areas- we were about a 500 metres from where the levee broke and flooded New Orleans, the total devestation and lack of rebuilding was astonshing. Our bus driver- Leroy was very open with his story. We looked around at one spot in the Lower 9th Ward neigbourhood that he lived in and he said before Katrina the neighbourhood actually looked like a neighbourhood. Now it looks like this:

Lower 9th Ward Destroyed Home in Lower 9th Ward

This is a street that used to be lined with houses. It is hard not to get so angry at the American government for not doing a thing to help the people who lost everything. Literally. Thankfully Leroy had another house he could move into, so he sold his land in the Lower 9th Ward and is living near the airport. Which is good that he has a place to live, but he told us he needs to buy everything from new now. The second picture I put up of the bathroom just got to me- I saw my image in the cracked mirror and thought, someone used to stand there and shave or brush their teeth, something so regular and so private and now it looks like this.

The people in New Orleans were so wonderful and welcoming and thankful. I wish we could have stayed longer to make a real impact, but hopefully painting the inside of a house, cleaning up the squatter remains and burned out porch of another helped a little.

If anyone reading this wants to know what you can do to help this is what every single person told us when we asked what we could do: Visit New Orleans. It is a city each of us should embrace and realize, especially living in North America, that it could happen anywhere. Natural disasters do not discriminate, governments do though (that's an entirely different rant- watch Spike Lee's Documentary When the Levees Broke). Visit the beautiful city with family or friends or a loved one. It will not be a trip you will soon forget. Mardi Gras was amazing, the architecture was beautiful, the food was exquisite and the people are so wonderful. We cannot forget them even when most of North America seems to have.

BLAH

EVERYTHING BLOWS RIGHT NOW
I HATE ANTI-ISRAEL PEOPLE
THEY ARE F*CKING UP MY LIFE AND ARE ALL SO STUPID AND GRAVELY MISTAKEN IN THEIR STUPIDNESS.

I will talk more about my Rebuilding trip to New Orleans once the stupidness of next week is over. I HATE THEM

It's a bird... it's a plane... it's a .... piece of ice???

So I've been thinking a lot lately as I've seen snow falling from roof tops (after the biggest storm in 50 years hit Toronto) what would happen if the snow were to fall on my head as I was walking down the street, how would I react?

Be careful what you wish for kiddies? 

Of course I didn't actually wish for this but well. So I'm walking down the street in Montreal on my way to one of my favourite stores on St Catherine, Simons (Psy-mons) - or if you are pretentious crazy person who's names starts with an A and ends in mber- seeee-mons. All of a sudden I hear this noise and I look up just in time to have a huge chunk of ice fall on my face, instead of quickly moving out of the way, I just cover my head in a self defensive position and wait till the ice blocks have stopped falling on me. Not exactly how I imagine I would react; with tortoise like reflexes. Anyway, it's not so bad, I have a tiny little scratch on my noise, though it did hurt like hell and it got a little swollen. More then anything I was just so out of it, the pain mixed with the fact that I just got hit in the face with ice that fell off the building. It was a weird feeling I tell you.

G-d and Bears

Ok I concede I was wrong

My birthday freaking rocked the casbah. But actually.

Dance class Saturday morning was great- woo new leg warmers from the friend... so warm!

Cake with the family- my brother and his girlfriend bought be a Coach purse- so nice, so sweet!

Dinner with the BF on Saturday night was amazing- great new fusion Indian-Italian restuarant- weird right? Not at all it was amazing! So sweet of him- G-d I love him.

Went out Saturday night, a majority of my Hillel friends came and it was just really awesome. I mean I really expected no one to come for various reasons- mainly b/c that is how my bday works and b/c of the crazy snow storm but people came and celebrated and I just felt so special! That's how you are supposed to feel right? I just kept thanking them and they were like duh of course we would come- I realize I probably appeared to be a nutcase, but really I was touched. Oh yeah and I sang Barbie Girl at the Karaoke night. HAHAHA... OY it was fun.

Sunday was great with brunch with the family and my BF, went to a great restaurant in the distillery district, again was just really touched.

The friend and I were going to go to the bellydance night that our bellydance academy has on the Danforth every Sunday night. We were super excited. I was so pumped. So I leave the JNF dinner early, I rush over and change, the BF (who stayed an extra night b/c of the weather) drove all the way down from Thornhill and we trek there. Not to mention the streets were a little flooded and to get from the car to the sidewalk we ended up in ankle (at least ankle) deep puddles, only to get there and hear that it was cancelled b/c of the weather ARGH!!! Seriously!!!!

Anyway, it was fun in the end we grabbed dessert and chatted and we will try to make it next week- I had an awesome time in the end and I take back my words about bdays sucking.

Thanks friends!!!! You all rule for making it truly special!!!

December 1 2007

Tomorrow morning is my birthday. The BF is in town- took him 8 hours to get here from Ottawa- got love the traffic that is the 401.
I thought I would write a post that would explain how I feel about getting another year older, about where I'm at in my life etc but I just draw a blank. A complete blank. These last two weeks have been so rough with anti-Israel crap on campus- I mean really tough, worse then last year in many ways and when listening to Norman Finkelshit speak last night I found myself absolutely drained. Absolutely. It scares me that there were about 250 people in that audience that applauded wholeheartedly when Finkelshit said he was jubilant when the "disciplined" Hizbollah defeated the Israelis. Do we actually behave like that in this society? Never, EVER, would I applaud and cheer for the IDF for killing people, for starting a war. Yes I would support them given the circumstances, but to cheer as if you are at a sporting event. It made my stomach turn. I will not even get into the bullying tactics the anti-Israel camp used at the farcical Ryerson Academic Freedom Academic Boycott Forum this past week. Truly it makes me lose my appetite- I guess I don't need to continue paying for dance class though if I decide I need to shed a few pounds. Sigh.
It's hard. Really hard right now.

But tomorrow is my birthday and to focus on something a little more fun let's see who I share a birthday with:

Bette Midler
Richard Pryor
Woody Allen
Candace Bushnell
Jinpachi Nizu (yeah I don't know who this is either, some Japanese actor who seems to be a big nobody but shows up on every birthday list, so perhaps he... or she... is a big somebody somewhere)

It's so strange

It's so strange my life now. I went from the person who was out all the time to being too lazy to go out. I mean I realize that during the week I'm so tired from work that I just want to sit in front of the tv and be a complete couch potato, but I don't think that's good and it's strange feeling going on inside. Literally half of me wants to go out and half fun and be social and the other half just can't motivate. Unfortunately the unmotivating part wins most of the time. It sucks. I'm not married, I don't have kids. Mind you the invitations are not exactly flooding in, but I suppose that's b/c I constantly turned them down. I don't know. I suppose this is a mini crisis. Most people, actually I'm sure nobody understands me. I imagine most people would say, yeah you're growing up and you don't need to go clubbing every night you can. True. But that's not even what I'm talking about. I sit at home and watch TV. It's Friday night and I stayed home. I had two invitations to do something and I stayed in. Sigh. What happened to me?

Drag Queens, Bollywood and Israelis

Thank you to Omer for letting me know that this song exists.
Dana International was born Yaron Cohen, for more information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_International
I love this it feeds into all my obsessions and insanities. Well maybe not the sex changing aspect.

Canada: Multiculturalism or Assimilation

Just read this article on Yahoo discussing the lack of tolerance in Quebec and in Canada in general. Especially towards new immigrants. It's strange b/c even I've said it "If you don't like it here, go back to where you came from." We have a certain way of living here and we're happy with it. But is this just scratching the surface? What happens when the way I practice Judaism is no longer acceptable. I mean sure I don't understand the Hassidic Jews way of living, but what happens when this country wants people to assimilate more to the point where it's unacceptable to keep kosher. 

As much as we pride ourselves on multi-culturalism I think we are more interested in assimilation like our friends to the South. Culture is a fun aside, it's ok if you are a different culture as long as you fit into Canada's secularism, like culture is ok as a side job.

It's strange b/c someone said to me during my summer in Israel that we Canadians don't really practice multi-culturalism. That Israel is more of a true mosaic. I don't know for sure about Israel, it's got it's only integration problems, but I see more and more that this multiculturalism that we pride ourselves on in Canada is more and more a joke. Especially considering what's been going on in Quebec.

(And yes it's easy to shrug it off as a Quebec issue, a French issue, but the fact is it's less and less of one- ie. Faith Based funding in Ontario and the backlash to it)