Independence day is my favorite holiday. It have always been. For one thing, I have an obsession with fireworks (different long story about a childhood’s independence day, which should be told while sitting on some professional’s couch). Other then that, it’s not one of our boring Jewish holidays, when everything is quiet, no people of busses in the street, everybody is at home, there’s no public parties, and the religious people are making everybody atheist suffer. I took it a bit too far with the description, but in essence that’s what I dislike about the way Jewish holidays are celebrated (or non-celebrated in my opinion).
Independence day is the opposite. It’s not religious, so you can do whatever you want to party (which depends if you want to party, which is the later part of the post). There’s speakers, and loudness, and people and busses in the street, and everybody is happy and dancing and buy silly merchandise, and unfortunately also spraying toxic foamy chemicals on each other, and there’s fireworks ! Ah yes. My favorite of all, Fireworks. But the fact is, it feels like a holiday, because you can actually see people happy and parting, unlike other holidays, where people are going to family dinners at most, and there’s no life outside other then the traffic jams on the way back from the dinners. Ironically, Yom Kippur feels like the second best thing there is for a joyous holiday, since there are no cars, and people, go out of their houses, because they already ate, and now they can’t and need to escape the food still hidden in their house, and the other people, like myself who like riding their bikes, and meet crowds of people, and say hi, and be happy, like you should any day.
In This Independence Day evening, I wanted to get drunk with friends. I’ve been wanting to do it for a while now, and it seemed like a good opportunity, since a lot of people tend to get drunk that evening. So, after watching the fireworks in tel-aviv’s center of town, me and Lee met dragged Assaf out of his house (a block away) and started calling friend to get them out of their houses to go get drunk with us. Assaf would even be driving designatedly, so no needs to worry. After more then 10 phone calls I gave up. Most of my friend are boring who went to sleep early, or didn’t feel like leaving their house, or don’t drink. I’m not surprised, because I chose my geek friends to be geeks and nerds, because I am one, so it’s only reasonable.
I did turn down, however, an offer by Idan and Yael to join yet another kumzits that Baruch and Anat do every year in Haifa. They do it every year and it’s became kinda tedious, you need to drive ALL THE WAY to Haifa, get filled up with sand and chat around with people I hardly know, and ofcourse Idan and Yael and Baruch and Anat are there with them, which I meet often. It’s kinda boring. So I had to undergo a series of long talks trying to convince me to go there. I wanted to go to a pub or party with a lot of people and get drunk, not go do an al haesh with people which most of them I either don’t like or don’t care about. I’ve done that, and the time to do it again is in Lag Baomer. Not Independence day. Sorry. Yael told me she had a lot of fun, but her boyfriend didn’t, actually he rather hated it. I would have felt like her boyfriend. Thank god I didn’t go there. I went to Gidi’s Barbeque the next day, which was full of pure Gidi-ish funness. I’m glad I did that.