Oded Sharon's Blog

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.

The past week was too lonely. Warning: Long post ahead (as you can see). A long and depressing post. Substitutes many kinds of sleeping pills ! Both to solve sleeping problems, and depression problems (by means of overdose). Get your long post today !


Ahem…

The past week was too lonely. Since Lee had to go to Poland with her father to take care of some family business, I was left here in Israel Alone.


Before she left, I thought to myself: “Oh Boy! I’m gonna have a week full with free time, when I don’t have to feel obliged to do everything I do with Lee, and that I can play hours upon hours of my computer games which have been piling, and I have a lot to do, like going to job interviews or learning new programming language, or go hang out with friends that I rarely do when I’m with Lee.”


What actually happened was exactly the opposite. My friend all bailed out on me, including two whom I planned to go get drunk with last night. Because of various technical reasons, I only started playing the game I wanted to play yesterday. The reasons were a combination of the fact that I ran out of disk space, and then out of CD’s to free up the disk space, and my irregular sleeping hours in the past week. I’ve been physically falling asleep at something like 20:00-21:00 and waking up in times like 3AM, 6Am or 10AM. I think my sleeping problems are caused by a lack of Lee, but I’ll judge that theory next week when she’s back. It’s like I don’t have the will to stay up later then 21:00. like I don’t have any reason to try. So I end up spending most the past week sleeping. And mostly, not a very good sleep too. Tossing and turning. Bah!.
I like to do stuff in the middle of the night. Actually I like to do the stuff I like to do in the middle of the night, rather then in broad daylight. Visibility of the computer screen and TV are better at night, and the mood, or atmosphere you get at night when everything’s quiet, and nobody can disturb me. So, the fact that my sleeping hours are like that, caused me to not like to do stuff during the hours which I was awake in, daytime. I ended up doing idle stuff till it was dark enough for me to feel right, but then almost immediately falling asleep. Only to be awake again by another cursed daytime !!

I actually had a lot to do in these daytimes, like Job interviews, and other bureaucratical stuff . In one of these daytimes I had to go to TAU, After I was done with what I had to do, I went on a “hello” trip around the faculty, saying hello’s to people I knew from my study days. At the end of the trip, I ended up in Schriber building’s lower open space room, where, incidentally, I met Gidi, and his gang to mathematician friends, and other friends, playing card and board games. I joined in. It was fun, and took me away from the fact that it’s still daytime.


The same day I went to this event Uri Fink made in celebration of him new Zbeng magazine. I really love the new magazine, part of the fact that I like most of Uri’s comic creations, now I can get them on a monthly basis, lots of pages of comics, and it doesn’t come with 30 more additional boring pages of Maariv Lanoard like it used to in the past. Having my sleeping “problem” I was very tired throughout the whole thing which took place from 20:30 to about 22:00 when I left, after talking to Gil Biderman for a while. I crash landed on the bed when I got home. It’s very annoying having to drive alone when you’re dead tired.

The whole evening made me want to be creative and start drawing. If only I wasn’t that tired I might have actually started. But a long night of sleep can get all those creative emotions out. Maybe some day.

What else did I do this week ? nothing. I think.
I’ve had troubles deciding what to eat, or make to eat, first because I feel guilty making food Lee likes when she’s not around, and second because of the end result of dishwashing, in case I make something. So I think I ended up eating much less then I’m used to. Probably lost weight. Also the fact that I had some vegetables left in the fridge that I didn’t want to see getting spoiled, helped my unplanned diet, by becoming a very big salad that I couldn’t finish, and had eat as a leftover today.


I’m going back to playing a game which I’ve had in my possession for a long while now, which have been waiting for me to play: Siberia. It’s a nice Point-n-click adventure game, very highly appraised and awarded game, from a few years back. My very critic persona, causes me to see a lot of game play, and story problems in this game, and I tend to complain to myself a lot about all sort of bad design issues, and bad writing issues in this game. It almost seems as if it was written by an amateur. I don’t say it isn’t nice, or that it’s story so far haven’t been magically interesting, but I am saying that the pace of the game is very slow, and that dialogs seems as if they were written specifically so the player would know certain facts, rather then characters speaking. I’ve seen better games in this sense. “Runaway” For instance, is the exact opposite in regards to game logic, dialogs, and story continuity. Thinking as a game programmer and designer, I can clearly see how some of these problems could have been fixed with not a lot of extra development cost, but usually in big projects like this, you tend to put more emphasis on graphics, and less on the story. That’s just sad.