Kids, pay attention in Hebrew school, or you will end up eating wax paper

I've decided to keep this blog and start updating it from my current location in Jerusalem, Israel, rather than start a new one, mostly because I've already got five defunct blogs in my Blogger account, and I felt like my Internet was getting cluttered. Jerusalem doesn't exactly get any white nights, but then again, neither did Russia in December 2008, when I started this blog. Please direct all complaints to Rupert Murdoch. About anything, not just this.

So, the first thing I notice about living in Israel is that living in foreign country when you can't read the alphabet is tricky. Well, to be specific, living in a foreign country where you can technically read the alphabet, but not easily, and you can't sound out (and therefore easily recognize or memorize) any of the words, because they aren't written with vowels, is tricky. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than at the grocery store. There, I was forcefully reminded of a book from my childhood called "The Man Who Couldn't Read," which was, intuitively, about a man who couldn't read, who depends on his wife for all of the shopping. One day, she leaves for a trip, and he has to go to the store himself, where he figures out what items to buy based on the shape of their packaging. Thus he ends up with wax paper instead of spaghetti, and all other kinds of inedibles. My first thought when reflecting on this book is, what kind of grocery store is this, where the wax paper and spaghetti are indistinguishable? I mean, spaghetti mostly comes in containers that have a see-through panel, or at least a picture of wheat. Wax paper containers come with a tin-foil saw blade. Saw v. wheat. Why didn't he go for the wheat? Fool.

My second thought is, holy shit, shopping for groceries when all you can do is rely on pictures and see-through panels is really effing hard. Okay, I found the spaghetti, but I can't tell which brand cost what without painstakingly, letter by letter (or as far as I'm concerned, squiggle by squiggle), comparing the price sticky to the labels, and I still don't know what the sales mean. More importantly, the pictures only get you so far. This can I am holding, with the tomatoes on the front: is it whole tomatoes? Diced tomatoes? Tomato puree? Tomato paste? Rat poison for your tomatoes? Only time, a can-opener, and daring will tell. This brown-looking bread: is it whole wheat? Honey wheat? Multigrain? White bread in brown-tinted packaging? I don't even know what is happening in the dairy aisle. There are tubs of stuff, some of which I cannot digest, some of which I don't want to digest, and some of which are precious food items that I do want to digest, but all in utterly indistinguishable packaging. Thank God (so much easier here!) soymilk is imported from some foreign brand that doesn't label their products in hieroglyphics.

Sidenote: For some reason, the grocery store sells only tiny jars of critical foods like spaghetti sauce and only jumbo bottles of shampoo and body wash. This is aggravating now, but after the End Times come (and let's face it, the chances are higher here than anywhere else), and we have only our pre-existing stock to rely on, the Israelis are going to smell the nicest the longest.

Anyways, new plan: go to a firm next summer, make all of the money, call Pat Sajak, and buy some vowels to donate to Israel. If I never update again, you know what was in the tomato can.