Shetihiye bari

I'm back at the apartment following a lovely family dinner (humus, tehina, pita, chicken kebab). I stupidly forgot to take photos, sorry, I was too busy listening to my brother's stories about the day he and his friends decided to test out whether it was faster to hop onto their bikes, following the swim, with the shoes already clipped onto the bikes, or not. So they put on their full wetsuits and jumped into the local pool and then practiced racing out of the water onto their bikes while one of them timed the whole thing, over and over again. I just kept thinking of what it would feel like to ride without wearing socks, which I still don't understand. My sister-in-law's brother (a gorgeous New Yorker who arrived this afternoon) then described his latest rock-climbing experiences. I countered with a fully detailed account of my latest power-walk up and down my local beach, wearing my sun-lotion and wide-brimmed hat. They were suitably impressed.

I told my parents about your excitement concerning Yiddish and Hebrew phrases. My father feels it would be remiss of me not to immediately teach you this Hebrew phrase:

Shetihiye bari.

Literal translation: "You should be healthy."

Actual meaning in everyday usage: "You should drop dead."

It's a true classic.

Off to bed, more tomorrow.

P.S. It is definitely faster to hop onto the bike which already has the shoes stuck onto the pedals. You're welcome.

Israel - day 1

Miss CB and I landed in Tel Aviv late last night (that would be Tuesday night Israel time). We made it. Quite a journey for two women who suffer from terrible travel-sickness.

Here we are this morning, posing outside the apartment building in which we'll be staying for the next week. It's an apartment which we're sharing with my parents, a five minute walk from my brother's house.
Behold my brother:

Miss CB and I arrived at his house at 7 this morning and were enjoying breakfast with my sister-in-law, three nieces and nephew when my brother came in looking just like this. He had just returned from a one and a half hour bike ride. My brother and I are pretty much, well, complete opposites. While I spent my childhood hiding in my room and reading, my brother was running, jumping, swimming and generally on the go, non-stop, forever. He's an Ironman several times over and is constantly training for his next Event. He is also an amazing husband to the loveliest and cutest woman, and their four kids are each a gem. A GEM I say!!

Even their dog is awesome.

Behold Oskar (note - with a "K"), he's a Cairn Terrier who reminds me of Eurolush's Tex, only beige and somewhat furrier.

Oskar immediately took a liking to Miss CB as she joined her cousins in working out the daily crossword over breakfast.

I shall try to take photos every day and share my experiences with you. I realise that these photos don't capture what Israel actually looks like from the outside, I'll try to show you the neighbourhood but for the moment it's all about the mishpocha.

One more random thing before I go

I highly recommend this film (and the trailer for it is great too):



The film's publicity consistently mentioned the screenwriter (the amazing Aaron Sorkin) which is quite something in an industry which hardly ever gives credit to any writers.

Although the story hangs on the lawsuit, it's really our story - the story of people who are living in the age of digital social networks. But now this one particular blogger must finish packing and go on a real trip.

See you on the other side bloggers.

A brief interlude

I can't sleep, too excited about my upcoming trip, so I'm listening to music on YouTube. You probably remember that one of my favourite movies is "International Velvet," and listening to the theme from the film always makes me happy. So I listened to it here:




And it suddenly occurred to me to see if the composer of this theme wrote any other music for films.

His name, it turns out, is Francis Lai, who knew? And he wrote this as well:



And this:



Fame is such a strange beast, I had never heard his name before. Why?

Monsieur Lai, you have a place in my heart,

love,

Eleanor x

Can you ever go home?

Tomorrow morning Miss Commentbox and I shall be flying to Israel to celebrate the bar-mitzvah of my brother's son. It'll be a bit of a family reunion as well as a trip down memory lane. My father's Israeli, Mum's American, and I lived in Israel for six years from when I was two until I was eight. So those were formative years in my life, I started school there, learned to read and write and made my first friends and memories. I have very very beautiful memories of my childhood and the nostalgia I feel for those years is immense. I shall not be talking politics in my posts, both because it's so complicated and because I am so ambivalent, also because that's not what this trip is about for me.

To get started here is the song I was listening to way back then - it was a winning entry in the Israeli Children's Music Festival and was THE playground hit that year.

I never thought this day would come

I never thought the day would come that I'd post about my car. I just don't really notice cars, well I didn't until now. Here is my original "Noddy Car" - a Nissan Pulsar which we bought second hand in 1996. It has served me so very well, but lately the entire dashboard sort of came apart, the turn signal started clicking reallyreallyreally fast, and then just when I got used to it the clicking would be slllllooooowwwwwslllooowwwslllloooww, the lights on the radio stopped working so I couldn't see the buttons at night, and every time we took poor Noddy Car for a service we'd end up spending enough money to buy a new car.

It took me an entire year to agree to purchase a new car, I just had no interest in doing the research and then spending such a huge amount of money. But sometimes it's cheaper to buy a new car than to keep repairing a wreck (sniff, Noddy Car, I still love you). So behold my Honda CRV in Sparkle Grey. I ended up buying the one car I always swore I wouldn't - yep, the kind of car petite blond Eastern Suburbs housewives drive(those of you who live in Sydney, you know what I mean).

Please note that I'm posing in two different pairs of jeans. Yep, I also swore way back when that I would never wear jeans again. How the mighty have fallen.

What do I love most about my new car? Being so high up, the brakes really working, the bluetooth phone system (had to get a new phone for that, my circa 1995 phone wasn't making the grade. Powder blue plastic, if you're wondering), and the CD player. I have never had a CD player (I know it's all about plugging in your iPod, but I'm taking it one step at a time). So I grabbed a CD, which happened to be Jennifer Lopez, I had forgotten I had it, and blasted it as I drove around aimlessly for an hour.

This is the song on the JLo CD which I had forgotten about, oh how I loved this song in 2001. My favourite aerobics instructor at the local gym would play it and teach us a routine. "Get ready for the chorus ladies, and cha-cha-cha."

Oh, and I wore my Dior foundation and new lipstick, and I swear the combination of makeup and new car took a good ten years off my age.

P.S.
Stay tuned, I'm off to attend my nephew's bar-mitzvah in Israel next week, and if all goes well I'll blog about it.

Eternal youth

Is beauty synonymous with youth?

I've been researching make-up for a project I'm working on at the moment, and it suddenly hit me that the cosmetics industry is geared towards a youth-obsessed marketplace. It's all about looking younger, minimizing wrinkles and age-spots, camouflaging the body's natural ageing process for as long as you can get away with it. How did I not notice this before? I've been living in blissful make-up free isolation apparently.

I suppose I can afford to be so surprised, I'm still in my early forties and I seem to have lucked out by inheriting my mother's wrinkle-free skin, so far anyway. But still, I feel personally offended at the way ad campaigns blatantly target women's biological realities and offer to fix them.

Can I ever be happy with the way I look, naturally, as I age? Or will I always have that nagging thought at the back of my mind that if I only try harder, find the right product, do more, research the options and spend the money...then, I might look more beautiful? I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Then I read this article in Zoe Foster's wonderful blog (one of my favourite Aussie beauty writers, she's so funny and sweet and adorable and ...um...young). The main point of the article is not at all about the ageing process but one particular phrase really caught my attention:

"And kind of ageing, to be honest"

Blake Lively is 23 years old, and yet even SHE should stay away from colours and styles which make her look old?

Is it possible for a woman to wear lovely make-up which makes her look beautiful but also HER OWN AGE? I'd like to think that when I'm 80 I'll be able to put on lipstick which will suit me rather than one which will make me look younger. Or is that a physical and/ sociological impossibility?

And before I leave you can I just add one quick thing? I've noticed that make-up and beauty blogs are all written by women, about women, and for women. It's women commenting on famous women's make-up and then advising "ordinary" women what make-up is best. This industry has absolutely nothing to do with men. I don't think men notice what make-up women wear, but women do. Case in point, I took it as my professional duty to buy some new make-up, for research purposes you understand, and then experiment with it. Miss CB and I had great fun, and I even went so far as to apply foundation (a Dior sample tube which is exquisite and a perfect match to my skin tone and is therefore to be referred to from now on as the HG). But then I stood in front of Mr. CB and asked him if he could see anything different about my face...ummm.....not really (he said this hesitantly). To further prove my point, I had my eyebrows shaped today and I thought that the difference was remarkably enhancing, but Mr. CB was perplexed, he saw absolutely no difference in my eyebrows whatsoever (he said this hesitantly again).

P.S.
HG is Holy Grail, it took me a while to realise that beauty bloggers who were referring to this were not writing about an actual product called "HG."