So, a couple of weeks ago I had a bad day. I was running perpetually late, the sun wasn't cooperating with my camera, the wind wasn't cooperating with my mics, the car I borrowed broke down on my way home...it really just sucked.
And then I got home and checked my email.
And my friend in Malaysia (where a bunch of my stuff is stored) wrote to tell me that there was "a little fire" at her apartment. Apparently, there was a bit of a gas leak in the apartment below and the fire alarm went off and everyone went outside and then the apartment blew up directly below all of my belongings.
Well, as all good friends (or maybe just the Malaysian ones) are, she didn't seem too worried about her own stuff, but she was terribly concerned for the charred wreckage of my extra clothes, pirate CD's and other odds and ends.
I, on the other hand, thought it was hysterical. The thought of my belongs exploding in a ball of fire somewhere in Malaysia some how made my day that much better. In the days that followed I went around telling everyone how my dear friend in Malaysia had blown up all of my stuff. As the days went on the story got better and better until just yesterday I told someone that my dear Malaysian pal had fought for 20 minutes against the raging flames, trying to wrestle my oversize luggage out her too-small window before she gave up and, with moments to spare, dove out her tenth floor window into the swimming pool. Of course, she only lives on the fourth floor, and a flying squirrel couldn't hit the swimming pool from her window, but hey, when you've got a good story why not make it a little better?
But then this afternoon she wrote back to say that she only told me that to see if I'd write to her. There had been no fire. No explosion. No flying squirrels diving out windows. My stuff was all still boringly intact in her apartment in Kuala Lumpur. And for a moment I was kind of disappointed....

So I'm in Israel now (and you can tell from the intermittent blogging that I'm very busy in Israel right now) and some people, I am sure, are expecting all sorts of passionate, political updates with words like "terrorist bombing" and "helicopter missile attack" and "horrific religious and ethnic conflict". But since I don't live in Gaza or the West Bank, I can only offer you the following:
I was walking up the street this evening on my way to the office to check my mail and do some laundry. I was approaching a three-way intersection with a traffic circle in the middle and when I was just a few steps away from the street a car came racing into the intersection and tore around the traffic circle before exiting on the one side where the wasn't a street, jumped the curb, narrowly missed a tree, and finally stopped in the middle of the sidewalk just inches from a stone wall.
I turned to my friend who has been in Haifa for a few years and asked: "What the hell was that?"
My chilled out semi-Israeli chum turned calmly to me and replied: "Parking."