To mark the official end of my two-month-long hiatus, I'm going to use this blog post to answer the question that I get most often from my friends and family back home: what exactly do I do all day? As soon as people hear that I'm a soldier in the Israeli army, they tend to assume that I spend my days in a Rocky workout montage, an M-16 slung across my back as I fight terror and make phlegm-filled Israeli sounds. As close to the truth as that is, there's a lot more to it. So, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you an army-approved summary of my daily life in my course.
5:25 am
My phone vibrates once before Destiny's Child's Bootylicious begins to blast at full volume, effectively waking me up just enough to blindly find the snooze button.
(Song and official music video for your viewing pleasure.)
5:30 am
Bootylicious begins to play again, waking up all of my roommates, but never me.
5:35 am
"Becca! We have 10 minutes! Get up!" And the song begins to play again. I jump out of bed, throw on my uniform, and race to bathroom to beat the crowd of about 40 girls to the five sinks for washing and brushing. I never beat the crowd.
5:43 am
"Two minutes!" We find our spots, stand in formation, and wait to receive our commander - a 19-year-old boy who quite obviously woke up no more than two minutes before he came to give us orders. We have our morning workout, followed by breakfast. Out of respect for food everywhere, I'm not going to get into what qualifies as "breakfast."
7:25 am
Misdar. Imagine you were preparing a dining hall for a grand dinner with the Queen of England. You dust, you wash the floors, you scrub all surfaces, you organize drawers and cupboards that she isn't even going to see. Imagine that the Queen's royal cleaners come and clean the entire room again. Then my dearest mother comes and does a final cleaning just to be sure. This room would not pass an IDF inspection.
7:55 am
We stand in front of the flags (the Israeli flag and the flag of my unit) in three rows: each row must be perfectly straight and perfectly parallel to the the other two rows. We receive the commander of the course, go through this weird choreography that ends with us holding our guns up in front of us, and raise the Israeli flag. This part of the day is important because it has the highest rate of misbehavior. Scratch your nose during this process and you'll be punished. Hold your gun with an arm that is not quite at a 90 degree angle and you'll be punished. Breathe loudly, you'll be punished.
8:05 am
Arabic class. This includes a test on the 28 vocabulary words that we learned the day before.
هذه الفقرة هي من باب المجاملة مترجم جوجل وليس الجيش الإسرائيلي. بقدر ما أود أن أدعي أنني بطلاقة، وأنا لا. تهانينا لأولئك منكم الذين تستطيع قراءة هذا و / أو كان بمعنى لترجمة ذلك! مكافأة الخاص بك هو نكتة: خبط خبط. من هناك؟ النقدية. نقد من؟ لا شكرا، ولكن أود الحصول على الفول السوداني بدلا من ذلك! (لدي شعور أن هذا لم يترجم إلى اللغة العربية بشكل جيد.)
1:00 pm
Lunch! (Usually a potato-themed menagerie of barely edible morsels.)
1:55 pm
Right after lunch, we have another class where we learn about our unit. Once I begin my job (sometime after April 25th), I'll write another post about what it is that my unit actually does. This class also usually has a daily test - in Hebrew of course - and is a lot harder.
6:30 pm
Dinner! During this time, I usually like to entertain myself while I down my potatoes by texting two lovely girls from my last course who deserve nothing but the shout-outiest of shout-outs. So Danna Price and Ayala Lesser, thank you for being my dinner-time entertainment and reminding me that there is life outside of my army base.
7:55 pm
Remember that awkward gun-dance we did this morning to raise the flag? Reverse it.
8:15 pm
We get in formation, each soldier wearing the following:
1 very heavy vest with...
36 billion pockets
1 very heavy metal helmet
2 magazines
1 M-16
2 water bottles that if, when shaken, they make any noise at all, you will be punished
1 full uniform
1 can of pepper spray
1 set of dog-tags
Then they do an equipment check to make sure that everything is in order. This takes forever.
9:00 pm
This varies. Sometimes we have a student-led class on something related to ethics or culture or something else interesting, sometimes we have a night work-out, sometimes we take a test, sometimes we have a meeting where we complain about things to someone in charge and then listen while he/she tells us that he/she is not going to do anything about it.
9:45 pm - 11:15 pm
The best time of all. This glorious hour and a half is when we are permitted to change into civilian clothes and study, shower, call home, read, hang out, compose blog posts in my head with Beatles' references in the titles. This is the only time throughout the day when my time is really my own.
11:15 pm sharp
Lights out. There's a pretty consistent rotation of thoughts in my mind during the 5-7 minutes before I fall asleep. My third to last thought is always, I could be at a frat party right now. My second to last thought is always, But I would never choose that life over this one, as hard as it may be. And my last thought, though I cannot fully articulate it, is a dreadful knot in the pit of my stomach as Bootylicious plays in my mind.
