JiM's Dreams

..is going very well, just at present.

We finally went and bought the bicycles we have been promising ourselves for the past year. All it took was for gas to creep over $3 a gallon and I'm sold. A nice Schwinn for now, cheap and dependable. Saturday, I bought the bike and took my first ride down to the park and back. Monday, I bought a gel seat cover and took my second ride along the coast. The poppies are out amongst the other coastal wildflowers and I rode in tandem with a pod of 8 dolphins who were fishing and leaping close in to shore. It was stunning.

NOW I remember why I rode everywhere as a kid. I loved it. It is not quiet but there is no conversation and one can let the thoughts bubble without feeling like one should share them or allow them to be interrupted with someone else's conversation. The muscles become stretched and vigorous and I can't beat the endorphin high. I'll let you know how the whole bicycle commuting thing works out.

We also saw an amazing film last night called "Va, Vis et Deviens" (Go, Live and Become), a movie in French, Amharic and Hebrew. Subtitle city. It was about a young Christian Ethiopian boy whose mother sends him off to Israel during the Operation Moses rescue flights in the 80's, pretending to be the son of a Jewish woman so he can get the hell out of a refugee camp in the Sudan where people are dying by the truckload. The adopted mother dies almost immediately and the movie shows his life at different stages with his new adoptive family and the challenges faced by that immigrant community in Israel, a modern country with all the conveniences including bigotry and racism. He struggles with his secret all the time he is learning to be an Israeli Jew and makes friends with a local Qes (the Falasha term for Rabbi). The movie spans about 15 years, through his schooling and army service and marriage and ends in a very uplifting way, but not before one feels that walking from Ethiopian to the Sudan might just have been the easy part of the journey for that edah.

One picks up little facts throughout the movie, which were later confirmed by a speaker, such as the fact that the suicide rate in that immigrant community (aliyah is the Hebrew word)was 12x that of any other. That 154 Christian children were brought to Israel as part of Jewish families whose parents adopted them as favors to Christian friends who wanted a better life for their children (and they almost all remain in Israel today as citizens. Or the sheer uncomprehending idiocy of bureaucrats who give immigrants new names merely because they don't like or can't pronounce the person's real name. Ellis Island is apparently not a singular case. The fact that people thought all those who came brought AIDS or other frightening diseases as a matter of course.

Anyway, great movie, I heartily recommend it, if only to do honor to those who walked thousands of miles, were tortured, raped, murdered and betrayed, all for the dream of living in "Jerusalem", a dream they had kept since the Queen of Sheba returned to her homeland. Life is never easy for any of us, but it does seem to me that some people get the hardest roads.

Dear BAD SGA fiction writers:

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" actually has some limits and clear provisions to it. Please stop gaily tossing the term about if you have never actually read about it anywhere but the letters section of the Podunk Times or someone else's slash fic.

Consider doing a tiny bit of research here: http://usmilitary.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=usmilitary&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sldn.org%2Ftemplates%2Fget%2Frecord.html%3Frecord%3D23

Honestly, people!

I should list the last 3 awful fics where the author screwed it up, but then I would feel bound to list the last 3 pretty good ones where the author also messed it up but I was inclined to mercy on behalf of the good writing.

Here endeth the rant.