How to Live Life Properly.

Last night I hitched a ride home with a Palestinian from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

(I told my Swedish friend that today and her eyes nearly popped out of her head. ‘Are you Cray-See?’ She yelled at me. She can’t say zed sounds. She thought I was standing by the side of the 443 with my thumb out and I just jumped into the first truck that stopped. I let her think that, of course, for a while, just to amuse myself.)

We chatted enthusiastically all the way home and it was so, so interesting – I insisted my new friend come into my house for a drink but someone in Ramallah was waiting. Shame.

This Palestinian friend of mine is very, very cool. She has a shaved head, a beautiful face and the sharpest of brains. She’s just come back from a conference in Sweden where four delegates from Palestine (her, two other women and a man), four from Israel (four men, dammit!) and four Swedes have been agreeing to terms that will bring something in the way of money or policy – can’t remember what exactly – to Palestine. She has a degree in marketing, spent six months in Spain becoming fluent in Spanish and is learning for the GMAT in order to study a Masters either in the US or Spain so she can do something great (come on brain – why can you never recall the details of these things) for Palestinian women. She’s only 24. She drives a brand new zoomer of a car like a dude, smokes the same brand of fags I don’t smoke and she’s seriously cool and inspiring. I want to know her and the other lucid, bright Palestinian girl in my class for the rest of my days. Teaching GMAT is great! I meet such interesting people who are about to embark on such boring MBAs. But I don’t care – I’m delighted to meet them.

In the office is a copy of ‘Life’s Little Instruction Book’. It’s ironic that books about creating a better life are always lying around in offices, but there’s some crucial advice in there for a more sublime existence, one of my favourites being:

495. Never buy a beige car.

Others worth mentioning are:

6. Have a firm handshake.
69. Whistle.
111. Never use profanity. (Whoops - shit.)
198. Feed a stranger’s expired parking meter.
216. Do it right the first time.
225. Never tell anyone they look tired or depressed.
226. When someone hugs you, be the first to let go.
246. Wave at children on school buses.
283. Never use a toothpick in public.
509. Marry only for love.





So I decided to start each blog page with a suggestion of my own.

Today we begin with:

#1. Draw up a list of your priorities.

In Israel, this is the time of year for changing diaries. This means all the snatches of thought and random ideas scribbled hastily in last year’s diary pages whilst sitting in traffic lights or on buses need to be read, thought about again and dealt with before getting mercilessly binned.

On the inner lining of last year’s hardcover, I found a(nother) list of priorities:
1. Finish book. (Yay! Tick)
2. Get job and money. (Working on the job thing – interview tomorrow in fact - money still an elusive substance)
3. Be happy and fulfilled. (This is obviously a lifelong project rather than a yearly one)

Although they were pretty monumental tasks I set myself, I’m still impressed that there were only three of them - I demand so much less of myself these days. The lists I used to write at the beginning of January every Gregorian year went into double pages. Every year since I was seventeen I wrote almost identical lists:

1. Take your driving test. Really this time. (Still took me ten lists, thus ten years to get around to it - the Tube was so easy! But when I did I had a handful of lessons and passed first time, so HAH.)
2. Write your story. You have to do this before you die. You could die at any moment.
3. Leave no continent unexplored.
4. Try every mind-bending substance known to man to see if any answers reveal themselves, and if not, have fun searching.
5. Party hard.
6. Solve world poverty and bring equality to all nations, races, sexes and creeds.
7. Destroy Babylon and all its deceitful practices.
8. Save the elephants.
(Etc etc ad impossiblum)

I can pick up any one of the diary/notebooks I've had since I was a young adult and the same kind of stupid bloody lists are written in there, things like:

I need:
a desk by a window
a room with a view - any kind of room, actually, would do
the computer moved or the husband moved away from it (pre-laptop days, when couldn't get near the effing machine)
some peace and quiet to gather my thoughts (HAH!)
some sun
an early night (fat chance)
a holiday (mmm – still sounds good)

That was followed by terse statements such as:

"I want to write so badly it aches. I think the latent euphoria is a burning drive to get started that never materialises. But, of course, my time is squandered on menial domesticity, which would be fine if I had three hours to myself every day..."

Well, I’ve got that - until tomorrow anyway. So things are definitely on the up.





My priorities are less clear these days. Priority Numbers One through Four are the children, no doubt about it, but so many other priorities, ones that existed before they did, have to be suffocated in order to keep them up there at the top. Am I the only one that wonders whether this is the still the right course of action? Twelve wonderful, enriching years of running around after them, changing their nappies, mopping hot brows all night, dealing with screaming fits in supermarkets and arguments in hot cars, clearing up their mess, ferrying them about makes me wonder if now might not be the time that the big ones learn the merits of a bus pass and the small ones what tzaharon is like. (Tzaharon is ‘afternoon club’ at school, where someone else ‘supervises’ them from 1.30 until 4pm leaving Mummy to have more time to tick things off in her lists of priorities. Or work like a slave, and let’s face it, that’s usually the reason kids get stuck in there.)

Whatever. I love those bairns and I'm here with the thermometer and the wet flannel in hand, but I think it's time for other stuff to rise up that there list and have their day as well.

So I now think short and long term goals are a better method for success.

Short term goals:
1) Make money from writing. Enough to carry on doing it, anyway.
2) Go to Ramallah. (Still slightly dubious about this one, but quite excited at the prospect too)
3) Make it to the end of the week without a headache.


Long term goals:
1) Have a book on the shelf with my name in the spine.
2) Have two books on the shelf with my name on the spine.
3) Learn the whole of the Torah, the Talmud, Hebrew, and philosophy throughout the ages. By teatime.
4) Make it to the end of the year without a headache.
5) Be happy and fulfilled.

Despite not much on any of my lists being accomplished in the last twenty odd years, have you any idea how happy I am that it doesn’t say ‘Take your driving test?’

Small mercies. Small mercies. That’s all I ask for.