30 post

[tamara_russo]

30 years. Man, that's a long time.

A fucking very long time.

I'm thirty today. I've been looking at this date for months now, growing nearer and nearer. Today I look back and think, so much have changed these past ten years. So much in fact, that I have a hard time remembering who I was then. Before so much of what defines my life today.

I didn't have an email back then, for fuck's sake. At the beginning of my twenties I was looking forward to being discharged, I had just been accepted to TAU (biology B. Sc.), best friends with Efrat, just ever-so-finely released from my high school lack of confidence.

And here I am today, at the beginning of my thirties, very different friends, very different career, all in ten years.

School. I spent 7 years of the last 10 years in school. Biology, Engineering. Biology was fun, and interesting, but as soon as I realized I wasn't going to tolerate working in a lab I knew it had nowhere to go, and I passed on even trying to find a lab for an M.Sc. In hindsight, I might have been able to tolerate it, but then again, what I can do today is most definitely not what I could have done 7 years ago. I don't regret these three years. I don't regret not continuing with Biology as well. I didn't want to work (I was afraid of work, which is hilarious), and I got to do some interesting things, learn a whole lot and meet my best friend. I filmed cats and dogs who lived in the same house for my project (and got my driving through it), spent stinky hours cutting fish with scissors for animal behavior lab (which got me great tales to tell), became a Perach instructor (the girl I tutored is now 20), and met Hagar, with endless notes passed between us in Biochem, Physio, Immunology and molecular evolution. First it was Harry Potter that tied us together, but then it was us who tied ourselves together. She's still the first and most precious gift I got from those three years.

And she didn't come alone. Boy, did she not come alone. I will never forget that day at Nurit's house, when I first met who will become the people I love the most in the world, at least for a couple of years. I was 22. And also, it was one day before I got Milton done – my sole and precious tattoo of a seagull, on my left breast.

We were so many, or at least it seemed that way to the girl who had two friends, and for the first time in my life, I felt I belonged. Efrat didn't understand. She couldn't. It was then that our friendship (or what I thought was our friendship) would really start to unravel.

For a year or two I was a part of a group of people who not only understood who I am, but were similar. We were so unbelievably odd. So different. The feeling of being around people who were odd the same way I was – it was intoxicating. It was the first time in my life I could really express my true nature without being scolded or feel inadequate, or be told I'm a weirdo. I can't even begin to express how good that felt, how right it felt. No wonder I chose them over Efrat, who felt more and more irritated with me having new friends, friends she didn't like nor understand. It was only two years or a bit short of that that I decided to cut her out of my life. It was one of the real life changing decisions I ever made, and one of the best.

But then the war happened, and the cracks started to show, and once the first one came along there was no stopping. Things broke up as fast and as hard as they came to be, and by the time I started my engineering B. Sc there was no longer "a group", but some friends here and some there, and the drift went on and on, until there was very little left. Mel and Hagar, that was the major thing there, and I was stuck in the middle. It was after my trip to England and Irland with Mel, when we were both very close, and the difficulty of keeping both Mel and Hagar in my life was the greatest. As time went by Mel and I drifted apart, and Hagar became much more dominant in my life.

Which only goes to show how only time can give you the right answer to some questions. How only time can make you understand what's the right course of action was, or is.

And I can say, knowing well, now, that making the decision back then to keep them both was the right one, because it was Hagar who would have been gone by now had I chosen then, and unfortunately Mel have made me understand during these past few years I don't mean enough to her to still be in my life. That was a difficult realization back then, some two and a half years ago, but I'm glad I made it. Continuing lying to myself would have been that much worse.

Between one degree and the other there was Yediot. I worked there as a secretary, my first real job, full time and minimum wage, but I stopped being afraid of work after that. That was the reason I went straight for university after the army, you see – I was scared of getting a job. Yediot cured me of that, and opened a doorway to my life as an adult. I guess I could have found a better job – being quite talented, fresh out of school, but like I said – I was scared, and that work suited me. In retrospect, if I would have found a different job – one with prospects, better pay, options etc., I might have been in a completely different place nowadays. Hell, I planned on going to learn to be a pastry chef before the 2007 trip abroad, but that trip changed my life course, as so many things in this past decade have.

Engineer. Who the fuck knew. Not me, I can tell you that. I hated physics in high school. I dropped it as soon as I could, and the math wasn't very appealing to me as well. What was appealing was the fact I'd have a good job after four years. I just had no idea how much suffering those four years would bring me.

I can't say if I regret this decision. I have a good career path now, steady, pays good money, good future, interesting, but it's not my passion. If, at 20, or even 24 I would have gone to art school (some kind of design, photography, curator school, something of the sort) I might have been able to work in an area I love much more and feel much more passionately about. On the other hand, I would have had to struggle much more (without a doubt) to get a decent job, might not have been able to squeeze into that very crowded world and left very struggling financially. I still look back and wonder, but I think, looking at the big picture, being pragmatic here was a better way to go. I might actually afford to buy an apartment this way, see, and that says something.

What stands out to me here, thinking and writing about all this, is how much I look back and doubt my professional choices but not my personal choices. I'm not sorry about cutting Efrat out of my life, I'm not sorry about how I handled the Mel-Hagar saga, the Asaf-Elisheva-Hagar saga, the Hadas-Hagar saga (oh dear), or the Oren saga.

Fuck. Oren. Can you believe he's still in my mind, four-plus years after that night? A crush, or was it more on my part, that culminated in a drunken night of dreaming which came crashing down on my head the next day. That was a difficult time. No, it was a hellish time. Second year of engineering, second year as Perach instructor and here I was, broken hearted and with no tools to deal with it whatsoever. Time made it better, bearable at first, and I hardly think about him nowadays.

But I do sometimes still.

You know what? If someone would have offered me a trip for a day back in time I'd still go back to that night. There's more to this, inside of me, but I can't or won't articulate it. It was important. Too bad it was a "bad important".

It killed my faith. For a time it killed my hope as well, but I got that back luckily. I don't believe I'll ever have my faith again. As if I needed more walls built around my heart.

Perach was a good experience. It taught me so much about people, about management, about juggling multiple tasks and obligations. It also gave me purpose. I felt like I was doing something important. To this day I believe that is one of the best things students here can do, and it's my most fulfilling job, even if it paid nothing.

I worked at the student union for a year as well, which didn't give me much – only a close look at organization politics, which was nasty and annoying. Gave me a few part time jobs though, after I quit Baker Hughes. All in all, it was a "student time", which was nice in its way.

The biggest difference now is the people I love. I met Lilach the first day of Biology. We went in search of our very first class together and even though she left after a year we stayed close friends. Who knew the first new person I'd meet in the university would be so compatible with who I now am? She's one of the sweetest people I know, without the weirdness that affiliates so many of my friends (and I love that weirdness, just so you'd be sure – because I share so much of it and also because it makes them interesting), and she can give me perspectives I can't find elsewhere.

I think somewhere around the end of my Biology degree I met Netalie. She came with the crowd, and was pretty much in the shades there until a few years ago when we started getting close. It took longer then the others, it was stranger then the others, but we ended up being very good friends, and adopted sisters (not to mention my family and her adopted each other as well). I love her to bits, and we talk about different things than I do with Hagar. Seems like each of my friends get to see different sides of me.

[my mom has friends from when she was 6, 10, 17. My best friends are from my mid-to-late twenties. As much as I resemble my mom in character, this is incredibly different between us.]

Helena was the only friend I kept from High school, and as such, we aren't as close as we were once. Besides being married to someone I don't always get along with, my new friends fit me much better.

I'm still at home, with my parents and my brother. It's mostly a financial decision, but I couldn't have done that if my parents and I didn't have the kind of relationship we now have. I can see what my mom and my sister's relationship have become, and it saddens me greatly. The whole saga with her divorce two years ago did a real number on us, but it also made certain feelings re-surface, after years of being ignored. Eyal still comes over, still talks to my dad regularly and still plays football with them. I think if they could, my parents would have adopted him and kicked her out, but they can't. It's been ups and downs these past two years, and I have no idea how it'll end. Michali's current boyfriend is a putz, which is annoying the hell out of me but I can't really do anything besides keep my distance.

As someone who grew up in a hothouse (that sounds better in Hebrew, maybe "Ivory Tower" is a good alternative here) I also got to meet people from all kinds of homes these past ten years. Families I didn't really know closely, all kinds of families, which only makes me appreciate that much more what we have, and how fragile it all is.

Then there's the music. I got my musical taste fine tuned these past ten years. Tori Amos (even though I've loved her since age 16 the real hardcore love came later on), Vienna Teng, Queen, Charlotte Martin, Maya Isacowitz, Peter Gabriel, Leonard Cohen. All of these weren't a part of my life back then, and they made me so much more complete, so much more of a person. And I'm still a bookworm. Which will never change, thank god. I love my stories. I won’t ever let go of imagining.

And the art. I love museums now. So much so, I went to New York just to get to go to all of them. I went alone, which was exhilarating and scary both, and was one of the most important experiences of my life. The photography came a year after I started engineering. I finally bought a camera and I took a small class, which opened my eyes and gave me the ability to finally do something with my artistic will beside produce an acrylic canvas once every two years or make boxes. I got into Society 6 in the last year, which is also great – for the first time in my life other people besides my friends and family see my stuff. It's a great feeling.

And I also got a brand new camera a few days ago, which I will put into good use in the next ten years.

I can go on and on (and I have…), but I think these are the most important things.

One last important thing, and perhaps the most important of all – my twenties were good. Mostly, yes, but no one can say he had it easy all the time. Overall, it was a huge improvement from my teens. Here's to another great decade, better than the one I'm leaving behind.

Thanks for reading. I love you all.

Comments

[perks123]

A very happy birthday to you. May this day and every one following bring you joy.

[tamara_russo]

Thanks! :)