The little pretties raise their hands….

And I jumped off the couch to do just that. For those of you who watched the Superbowl (and for once, it was) and saw Bruce Springsteen rock out for the first time in your lives? Well. Take that energy, multiply it times infinity because you are live and in the same space, stretch it out over three hours, and THAT, my friends, is a Springsteen show. I can’t believe that the camera man didn’t duck when Bruce did the knee slide. I know I speak for fan girls everywhere when I say that getting a face full of Bruce crotch was the highlight of the halftime show.

Now, as for the commercials, they were particularly lackluster this year, I think. Oh, sure, there was the talking baby selling e-trade. Not as funny as the clown, but amusing. There was the Budweiser Clydesdale ads, always good. I loved the horse playing fetch. The SoBe lizards were ok, even without three-dee glasses. Bob Dylan selling Pepsi? Squeed me out. Even if it was technically good, and Will.i.am is cool… Bob. Dude. I understand, but you don’t NEED the money. Victoria’s Secret was kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Pepsi? Just crass sell out. And it’s still carbonated sugar water that isn’t even as tasty as Coke. Which I rarely drink, either. I’ve always been more of an UN-Cola girl, my own self. But I digress. I have no idea what Alex Baldwin was selling, but seeing the cheesy animated alien tentacle come out and adjust his tie was rich.

Did I miss anything good? Oh, yeah. The game.

I woke up today, tentative, sending my mind out into my body, ready to retreat at the first sign of pain. There was a little fuzz around the edges, but I quickly banished it with two full mugs of strong coffee. I took a shower, washed my hair and shaved my legs. I feel like a human being again for the first time in weeks. I have photographed my handspun, updated my Ravelry site, paid bills, and made the world’s best kale/bean/winter squash mole. And I still have time to make something else before the game starts. It may not look like it to you, but this is the best food ever.

I woke up this morning with a migraine.

A more verbose and accurate description, however, would be to say that I came to in my bed, aware of a blinding pressure/pain behind my eyes, as though someone were trying to push them out of their sockets and into my lap. This was accompanied by a searing band of pain that extended from temple to temple, across my eyebrows, and felt no more than a quarter inch in width.

I crawled out to the kitchen, made coffee and drank a cup to wash down the 600 milligrams of ibuprofin. Then I crawled back to bed with hot washcloth over my forehead. Here’s a science experiment, kiddies: why is a wet washcloth, when heated in the microwave for 1 minute and 22 seconds, too hot to touch, but can dissipate all its heat in the 20 seconds it took me to get in bed and put it over my face? Whatever. I tossed and turned in writhing agony for about twenty minutes, then stood under a hot shower in the dark for another ten. I let the water pound onto my skull. It helped. Then I got out of the shower and threw up.

Five hours later, I came to again, and watched the last half of Malibu’s Most Wanted, ate a handful of strawberries and went back to bed. It’s almost 9 pm, and I’m not sure if the session is over. Not what I had in mind when I asked for a big weekend. Tomorrow is the Super Bowl. I hope that when I get up, I’ll be fit to make the bean/kale/winter squash mole, and watch the

commercials

big game.

Blurgh.

In the history of weekends that suck, this one is taking the proverbial cake. I took Friday off of work to go and see my Auntie. She knew me. We talked. I took her putlejon, but she was too weak to eat it. Yesterday I went to see Mummy for the first time in two weeks. I hadn’t been because of the chest cold from hell, and I didn’t want to visit her while hacking up lung and sniffling. With the Auntie, what the hell. She was actively dying, so what was a cold germ going to do…kill her? Hah. I was so shocked at my mother’s appearance, that I went straight to a bar and downed a shot of scotch. She had knocked her shin on the wheelchair and had a bruise that went from her knee to her ankle, and was highlighted by a skin tear about two inches long, in a v-shape…She had a blood blister on her big toe the size of a dime. Her “good” eye was weeping and half-shut. The psoriasis had come back on her scalp with a vengeance. She was grinding her teeth. And then, she said the Girlcousin’s name. Whee. Drink!

Today, I tried to sleep in, and got a phone call around ten from the family at my Auntie’s bedside. If I was on the road, they said, I should put the pedal to the metal, because it didn’t look like there was going to be much more time. I woke the RLA and tossed on my clothes, all the while moaning that three days of this in a row was taking its toll on my mental health. And before I got my jeans zipped up, the phone rang again. Never mind. Dilemma has been solved. Auntie is gone. We’ll all meet at the funeral. Tomorrow or the next day.

I keep telling myself that I can’t possibly be an alcoholic, because the shot of single malt I downed at 10:15 this morning nearly killed me.

I have locked myself in my studio for the remainder of the day. I’m going to rearrange the space and make it a sewing room again, instead of my computer lab/knitting storage.

6:00 p.m. I lied. There was just no way I could concentrate. Instead of organizing, I washed three skeins of yarn and hung them to dry. I finished a book. I did the crossword. I changed the bedding. I smoked cigarettes and stared into space. Time to feed the dogs.

Because in the dead of night last night, the oven started beeping. Three a.m. Beep. Beep. Beep. Only, there was nothing in the oven, no reason for it to be making that noise. F1. It’s an F1 error. The manual says to call a repairman. Probably not a three a.m. Reset the stove. Beep. Beep. Beep. The RLA, with lightening-fast reflexes, puts music on in the bedroom, to mask the noise coming from the kitchen. He chooses the soundtrack to Blade Runner. Loudly. I bury myself under a few more blankets and hope that the white noise of the cat purring will mask the sound of the masking music. I proceed to have nightmares about my mother and finding another stash of her needlework magazines, patterns and supplies. I start to cry in my dream. And then, through all of this, I hear the metallic sound that my alarm clock makes that it says are “bird calls”. It is 6:15. Welcome to my day.

The RLA drags himself out of bed and into the dark to attempt to pull the breaker on the still-beeping oven. The cat wants food. The dogs want a walk.

My cough is becoming productive (again), which is the way it always goes when I get one of these chest colds. Tomorrow, I need to take a day off of work and drive north to visit my father’s sister, for what is predicted to be the last time, before we all meet at her grave side. This is getting old. She will be the third aunt to pass away in 6 months.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The Hatikvah is the national anthem of Israel. It means “The Hope.” These are the English lyrics:

As long as deep in the heart,

The soul of a Jew yearns,

And forward to the East

To Zion, an eye looks

Our hope will not be lost,

The hope of two thousand years,

To be a free nation in our land,

The land of Zion and Jerusalem

To be a free nation, in our land.

And yet, the Israeli government has turned Gaza into another Warsaw Ghetto. I’m not pro-Palestine by any stretch of the imagination, but what is being done in my name (and as an American Jew with the right of return, the action in Gaza IS being done in my name) is just wrong. It’s wrong, not on a humanitarian level, but on a human level. It is wrong to deny medical supplies. It is wrong to withhold food supplies. It is wrong to bomb schools. It is wrong. It is wrong to use the schools, as Hamas does, as a shield against possible military action, but (and here is where I become totally inarticulate) it is a compound wrong to ignore that a school or a hospital is ultimately a civilian target. Chris Hedges, over at Truthdig, says this far more eloquently than I.

And when you have turned a community into a walled and isolated ghetto, it is wrong to imagine that the civilians will not take arms against the oppressor. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I can’t support Israel’s actions. But this is not, for lack of a better word, very yiddishkeit. This whole war goes against everything my rabbis ever taught me about what makes a Jew a Jew. Love of life. Love of education. Taking care of the sick, the poor, the old. Defending the rights and liberties of everyone, even those who would kill us.

There is an editorial from the Haaretz , which sums up my horror better than I can. I give you the first two paragraphs, but the link above will take you to the whole thing.

The legend, lest it be a true story, tells of how the late mathematician, Professor Haim Hanani, asked his students at the Technion to draw up a plan for constructing a pipe to transport blood from Haifa to Eilat. The obedient students did as they were told. Using logarithmic rulers, they sketched the design for a sophisticated pipeline. They meticulously planned its route, taking into account the landscape’s topography, the possibility of corrosion, the pipe’s diameter and the flow calibration. When they presented their final product, the professor rendered his judgment: You failed. None of you asked why we need such a pipe, whose blood will fill it, and why it is flowing in the first place.

Regardless of whether this story is legend or true, Israel is now failing its own blood pipeline test. As Israel has been preoccupied with Gaza throughout the entire week, nobody has asked whose blood is being spilled and why. Everything is permitted, legitimate and just. The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest.

Finally, I see in the morning news that the Israeli government says that the Gaza action will be complete in time for Obama’s inauguration. I saw that floated as a theory last week, that this push was Israel’s response to the end of the Bush administration, wherein this kind of war crime was acceptable. That the Gaza action would be over by January 21, because an Obama administration is still an unknown. I laughed when I read that, thinking that it was just typical conspiracy, tin-foil hat thinking, even if it was being posted in the mainstream media. And then, today’s headline.

I’m ashamed.