I am sitting here at my computer, playing freecell. Somehow I find myself pondering the flowershop scene of the movie… and am taken visually and viscerally to the movie, City Lights with Charlie Chaplin. To the scene where he passes the flower shop where the girl whose eye operation he paid for works.
I saw that movie back in Hungary. I was young. And I didn’t understand the movie.
Today I realized: I didn’t understand the movie because I didn’t understand that the Chaplin character was poor.
I lived in a country, in a household where poor wasn’t a meme. We had what we had. And we were alive.
You could argue that poor isn’t a meme, that it’s a fact, but it isn’t.
You have what you have, and that is not a meme. But what you don’t have is not real, other than in your thoughts, in the memes. Lack is only real in the memes.
There is no “no” in reality. And poor somehow indicated “no”… If I read “poor” I knew the mood, I knew it was something you don’t want, but outside of books it didn’t exist for me.
Fast forward to today’s date, and I still don’t really have poor. I am glad I don’t. I am glad I can be happy with what I have. It is easier to live and enjoy what I have, buy what I need, and not worry about what I don’t have… because it is not real.
I have a very limited diet and I do well on it. I go to the grocery store with hundreds of thousands of items. I buy what I need. I am happy.
I am not saying that the lack of something, of something missing haven’t shown up for me at all.
But it’s not the lack that shows up, but the reality it creates, the reality of stupidity, of awkwardness, of misunderstanding, that is what shows up. Not the lack.
I am an Israeli citizen. I lived in Jerusalem. Trump declared that the US will move its embassy to Jerusalem.
For some weird reason everyone wants to tell Israel what it can do and what it cannot, and as an empath I could feel the huge oceans of colliding: feelings of fear and feelings of rage.
I wept. No thoughts, just fear. And a little bit of pondering what that president who cannot even read properly, intended to accomplish with angering half of the world, the half that hates Israel… and who hate me. Hate is real for me.
It is obvious to me, that Jerusalem is Jerusalem, whether anyone calls it capital or not. I never cared. Never needed Trump’s approval… being approved by someone you don’t approve of is fool’s gold.
I, and Israel, and all the Jews I know want one thing: to be able to do what we want to do: study, work, invent things, think things, read, go to school, eat, worship if we want to…
Just simple things. No approval, and definitely not Trump’s… Him wearing a Yarmulke actually irritated me… how dare you?!
