Self-Challenge

Okay, since I have been a totally unreliable blogger, I think I'm going to make myself do a "blog every day" thing.

I was watching Charlie McDonnell (charlieissocoollike) on YouTube a few days ago and he said he would vlog every day this week because he hadn't uploaded much lately. It's also April, which is usually when bloggers and vloggers go on crazy "every day" escapades. So I figure I'll give it a go. For one week. See what comes out of it.

Hi?

Okay...I haven't updated. Yeah. But here's a big long one, okay?

This year, 2012, is the Tel Aviv Art Year. I believe they chose now because a new museum building has opened and the Tel Aviv museum now houses the largest collection of Israeli art.

So last Saturday night (the twenty-somethingth) they officially kicked it off at the Tel Aviv museum grounds. The great thing about that area is that it's quite cultural; there is a large theater nearby as well as a library. The event was entirely free, including entrance to the museum. There were all sorts of performances and activities. In one corner there were people singing opera, in another there was an audiovisual stage with mainly loud rock music. Street musicians had been asked to come and play. The sculpture of people feeding pigeons was covered in sunflower seeds as it should be (but they only put out the sunflower seeds when it's a special event). There were lots of cardboard houses arranged into small cities, and most of them were taller than me, so it created small "streets." There was one area with tons of colored cardboard blocks which could be stacked and made into all sorts of amazing structures (this is part of the Dreamfields urban innovation project). Everyone was building, no matter what age or what language they spoke or where they came from. There was also a computer component to this - you could play the Dreamfields game and it would be projected onto the wall of the museum.

On another wall, there was a place for shadow play, with a white light that invited people to create strange shapes and pictures. Our silhouettes appeared enormous on the wall.

I loved it. All the art and culture and connection and bright lights and people, all together. That night, it felt amazing to be alive.

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Yesterday I went to the Bahai gardens in Haifa, where I was for the weekend. The gardens are famous, with their carefully planned terraces. In the center is a shrine for their founder - the Shrine of the Bab - who is buried there.

It was weird, from up there I could see all of lower Haifa - all of it that isn't on the mountain. It all seemed so temporary, like a bubble - the gardens so carefully created and maintained, the shrine's pristine gold dome, the rusty city, the dirty buildings with laundry hanging from the windows, the old neighborhood's red ceramic roofs, the glassy new buildings rising up from it all, the people bustling and running from place to place like so many ants. I could easily imagine that one day it would be gone and only the trees and the wide sea would remain, moss and ivy making crumbling ruins of the plaster walls. I don't know why I felt that. But its temporariness made me appreciate it a bit, I guess - the gardens planned so that they would seem like the product of much work, the buildings washed of the dust that the smog carried everywhere, the old train tracks still there, unused, flowers peeping between the steel rails.

Later that day we walked in my grandparents' neighborhood. We passed a building that was once beautiful but now was just abandoned. The windows had cardboard on them from the inside and the garden was overgrown. People come and go, they work and they rest, and what they leave is up to nature to take up.

And that's what nature did.

Quote of the Week: from three weeks ago

Okay, this is my first quote to make up for my absence. It's pretty long but it's one of my favorites ever.

"It's a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never come across anyone who cares about anything that matters."

~ Paper Towns by John Green

There is something about this quote that makes you look at the world in a different way. The whole book, Paper Towns, has got to be one of my favorites. The characters are people just like me (albeit a bit older) and I don't have to imagine much to understand their feelings and reactions. The book makes you think, and it made me look at the world in a different way. I definitely recommend reading it, if you weren't convinced by the quote.

I am Lazy

I haven't updated my blog in a week...

And I can't make any excuses, I mean...I was on vacation most of last week and today double geometry at the end of the day today was canceled so I got to go home at 1 o'clock instead of 2:45.

I admit it. I have been Lazy. With a capital L. And I already missed three quotes of the week. Harrumph.

Right then, time to get cracking. Triple QOTW, updates, and the like. It's actually kind of nice to make myself do work that I decide on.