Random ejections
On our last night out together Zach tells me the story from his first stay in Israel. He had a friend in the states and their method of correspondence was via tapes. They would decide on a theme for their tape and then one person would add a song, send the tape to the other, who would add the next song, and so on and so forth till they had a full tape.
The story reminds me of when I was a kid and tapes were still around and how I would record all sorts of songs from KROQ to make scratchy mix tapes. The many road trips spent curled in the back seat, listening to a tape of the Smashing Pumpkins or the Cranberries. I even had a "Home Alone" video-recorder shaped tape recorder and friends and I would record a million pointless sound bites.
At this point I can already see how things in my childhood look like fossilized relics from another time. I can see the gears turning in my children's minds - trying to fathom the alienness of "tapes."
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Minor musings on the periphery:
Whenever I think about moving to a small town I get a kind of feeling of repulsion. The thought of living at a distance from a cultural center seems awful but really, if I think about it, I've never lived in the center of any big city. In Los Angeles (or should I say Greater Los Angeles) I was in the suburbs, divided from the rest of LA by a mountain range. In the Bay Area I lived in Berkeley, with a transit time of at least 40 minutes to get to SF's cultural jewels. (and in Los Angeles there was a transit time of at least 40 minutes to get anywhere). Here in Haifa I'm, similarly, about 1 -2 hours away from Tel Aviv.
So why should I be worried about "small town" living if that's essentially what I've known and what I apparently prefer?
The story reminds me of when I was a kid and tapes were still around and how I would record all sorts of songs from KROQ to make scratchy mix tapes. The many road trips spent curled in the back seat, listening to a tape of the Smashing Pumpkins or the Cranberries. I even had a "Home Alone" video-recorder shaped tape recorder and friends and I would record a million pointless sound bites.
At this point I can already see how things in my childhood look like fossilized relics from another time. I can see the gears turning in my children's minds - trying to fathom the alienness of "tapes."
-------------------------------------
Minor musings on the periphery:
Whenever I think about moving to a small town I get a kind of feeling of repulsion. The thought of living at a distance from a cultural center seems awful but really, if I think about it, I've never lived in the center of any big city. In Los Angeles (or should I say Greater Los Angeles) I was in the suburbs, divided from the rest of LA by a mountain range. In the Bay Area I lived in Berkeley, with a transit time of at least 40 minutes to get to SF's cultural jewels. (and in Los Angeles there was a transit time of at least 40 minutes to get anywhere). Here in Haifa I'm, similarly, about 1 -2 hours away from Tel Aviv.
So why should I be worried about "small town" living if that's essentially what I've known and what I apparently prefer?