Not Anonymous

Mother Unit: "Why didn't you go to the Pride Parade today?"

Moi: "It's too hot" It is, it's something like 35C in the shade and the Parade began at noon... no thanks!.

Mother Unit: "Committed, eh?" /sarcasm

Father Unit (looking away from the exciting Tennis match on TeVi): "Are you trying to tell us something?"

Moi (mental *sigh*): "Huh? What? What are you talking about? I went out on a date with a woman yesterday".

Father Unit: "Oy" and he goes back to the game.

Moi: "What? I thought you wanted me to date".

Father Unit: "I don't mind you dating women, but why not try dating men again".

Mother Unit: "Yes, why do you have to be so exclusive".

Moi (is having a brain meltdown): "You wouldn't say that if I were only dating men!"

Mother Unit (is thinking of what she said): "Yes, funny how that is".

Moi: "Not really".

I think they're dreading the day I date someone long enough that I actually bring them to Friday night supper and such.
I think I'd be worried if my parents were uber supportive of everything I do, I mean, it's nice to know they're a normal hetero-normative middle class married couple who love their daughter enough to be accepting, if not ready to march in the Parade. Then again, I need to be motivated to walk in the Parade, because Dude... the heat!
As it is, the date went quite nicely and I'll be calling her back, so we'll see how it goes.

Traveling is hard!
But fun when you're being taken care of by dear Papa.

Arrived, finally, at half-past eight (local time) in Cape Town. My memories of the place are very vague and everyone seems so much shorter and older.
Seeing as the last time I was here I was nine, this makes sense.

I slept like a rock. I don't think I moved the whole night.

Nobody can believe how big I am and some of the people keep referring to me with my older sister's name, Leigh. I suppose their sharpest memories of Leigh are of her with short hair, like I now have.

Today we went to wine country near Cape Town called Franchhoek (pronounced Fraan-tzuk... don't ask me how, I do not know how Afrikaans is built) and went around the very sweet and picturesque town. It was founded by the Huguenots (French Protestants who escaped France in the 17th century after the Nantes edict proclaiming France a Catholic Kingdom) who built the whole wine industry in the valleys in the area of the Western Cape which include Franchhoek, Paarl, Stellenbosch and another one which I can't remember, because there weren't any road signs to that one.
We decided to go because of the weather. The fog and most is blinding, you can barely see 100 meters ahead of you. We're hoping it won't get worse, but you can never know. It is weird going from the beginning of summer into what amounts to the middle of winter for me, even if they only started with winter now.
I'm chilly.

Daddy and I called Mummy while we were there and it appears that two people she and Daddy knew from their History live there, we only found one and Daddy said it was amazing how much time passed.

We went wine tasting too, which was fun, it's something I'd been wanting to do since I saw the movie "Sideways" but it was more the idiosyncratic characters than the setting in Napa Valley California that made it such a great movie.

We have since returned to our home base and will soon be going to sup with my Granny (who I saw last night) and the uncles, aunts and cousins I hadn't seen in years.

I just got home from an outing with Mummy (she's leaving for the States tonight for a couple of weeks and I took a break from my studying to spend some time with her before she goes) and as we were driving up one of the busy roads, there right in the middle, on the separation line was a kitten, couldn't of been more than a month and a half or two completely frozen.

I told Mummy to stop the car. Stop the Car!!!! And she said she didn't want me to get run over, I said I have to get that cat.
It was so tiny and my heart was just breaking seeing it.
She stopped on the curb and I ran out, thankfully there was only one car coming my way and the driver had also seen the kitten and drove to the curb when it saw me approach.
A human was all it took to get that kitten running back the pavement and under a parking car - I tried picking it up, but it dashed into the bushes.

The driver of the other car asked me: "Is it all right?"
I replied: "Yeah, it's out of danger"
She smiled at me, waved and drove off.

I went back to Mummy and practically burst into tears, she said she would have stabbed herself if she's have run over that kitten.
She said I was a good person for going into the road and getting that cat out of the way.

I have to ask:
Is what I did so extraordinary?
Wouldn't a better person actually pick up that kitten and take it home?
Wouldn't the average Jane/Joe do what they can to NOT kill another living being?
Why is doing something so small like that worthy of a smile from a total stranger?

I have a button that says "blame my parents" and I do, but in the way that button supposedly means.

Tonight my parents and I ate supper together, it was very nice, it doesn't always work out that we eat at a normal hour (around half-past seven) all together, our lives don't always mesh until around nine PM.
Anyway discussions, as ever, turned to politics.
There were disagreement, mainly between Mummy and I, seeing as Daddy was happy to just sit there, eat and watch the drama.
It wasn't really big argument, just a big clash of ideologies; I mean the differences between the way Mummy (and probably Daddy, but he didn't want to add much to the conversation) and I see things about the Israel/Palestinian conflict aren't big, not really, mostly I see Israel as purposefully keeping Gaza and the West Bank in Occupation/Poverty/etc. and Mummy says the Palestinians do it to themselves.

I learned my Humanism from Mummy, the whole People are People whoever they are; I mean the woman came olive picking with me in the Territories! I suppose that's why we have such heated arguments, our views aren't so far from each other, we both think the Palestinians deserve to be liberated from the brutality of their lives and that a Palestinian state is important - but the differences between whose to blame and who isn't is a sticky point.

I can't and won't say that everything Israel does is bad and that all the Palestinians are good, I mean, this is quite obviously not the case.
I'll also put a whole lot of blame on the other Arab and Muslim states and nations who use the Palestinians plight as an excuse to hate Israel and spread their Antisemitism, when they do nothing to actually help the Palestinians proper, like fund for housing, hospitals and education that doesn't incite hate and prejudice and not just give money to Hamas to buy more weapons or to Fatah in order to line their pockets.
Israel does, however, control everything that goes on in the West Bank and not allowing the PA to actually create a proper authority in the Territories - not to mention the Settlements, but that's just a whole other post - and lest we forget the continued siege on Gaza because no one is willing to talk to Hamas, not Abu-Mazen and Fayyed and not Olmert and Barak.

I've been told that everything that Israel does in Gaza is in retaliation to the Qassam rockets, which have been fired onto Sderot and the Kibbutzim of the West Negev for the past seven years (ever since the early stages of the Al-Aqsa Intifadah), and yesterday two rockets fell on siblings in Sderot, the older 19 year old had medium to minor injuries, the 8 year old had to have his leg amputated this morning.
It's a tragedy.
Missiles were fired into Gaza by the IDF and two bystanders in Rafah today were hurt, though no information was given about their condition.
This is also a tragedy.
Is one more tragic than the other?

So Mummy and I argued and we huffed at each other for about half and hour, and on TeVi there was movie in which a mother died and I began to cry, thinking about how terrible it would be for Mummy to die after we fought - my mother, who says (and I agree) I get my sentimentality from my father, said that just because we disagree doesn't mean we fought.
Awesome Woman.
I cried a little more and asked jokingly "You love me even though I care about suffering Palestinian babies?"
She laughed and said "Yes, but you don't need to care about all the suffering babies in the world... you're too sensitive"

Ain't that the truth - I still blame my parents for that though.

Yay, Mummy's coming home tomorrow!
Just in time for her to go back to school and teach.
Poor Mummy, won't even have time to get over the Jet Lag.
But at least she'll be home and I'll be seeing her for a significant amount of time and not a few weeks at a time, since this summer have been fractured when it came to us being at home together, what with all the traveling we both did.

But tomorrow she'll be home.
Which is lovely.

morin came over today to help me stop freaking out about my University schedule, which I'm glad to say is under control.
Seeing as morin studied the Lit. half of my double major (Lit. and Gender) she helped me understand what goes where, what (in her opinion) were good courses, and I could thus figure out how to arrange the courses I want.
Monday I'm going to a course consultant who should help me with tweaking my hours.

Soon I'm going to be a student.

Wow.

It's a bit overwhelming, seeing as this is the first time I really have no idea what's going to happen next. I mean for all I know I could end up hating Lit. or Gender, or GDess forbid both.

Gah! No that is too horrible to think about, so I won't be.

But really, this is the first time where no one is handing me off to my next station in life, since after Junio High, came High School, after High School immediately came the Army and I knew that after the Army I'd be off to America (since the family and I discussed this) and I knew I'd be taking these two years off so that I could live outside a structured environment and actually do what I like.
Theses past two years were nothing like I imagined they'd be, but c'est la vie, you gotta roll with the punches and all that shit.
So now I'm going back into this frame of study, for myself, what I want, in order to get a degree.

How lovely.

In addition, the genocide in Darfur must be stopped.

וכמו כן, צריך לעצור את רצח העם בדרפור.