18 Things You Shouldn't Say While an Army Doctor Checks your Nuts

#1 Is it my turn next?

#2 While you down there…

#3 This is just like what Uncle Jack used to do…

#4 Look sir! I have a Man-gina!

#5 Dr. Spitzer did a great job with the transformation don’t you think?

#6 Be carful, my one-eyed snake bites

#7 Sorry for staring you in the eye

#8 I know you’re impressed!

#9 Usually people take me out to dinner first

#10 He’s got a cold,  sometimes his nose runs, but it’s the sneezes you gotta watch out for

#11 Oh so that’s what that does!

#12 WHEEEEEEEE!

#13 That’s nice

#14 I think you forgot to cut your nails

#15 Was it as good for you as it was for me?

#16 Why but the cow if you get the milk for free?

#17 Their names are ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’, right now you must be feeling good.

#18 I’m having a ball!

The truth is, when I got into the doctor’s office at the army recruitment headquarters I had gone through so many stations on different levels of this building (without a lift) that I was quite numb to the whole experience. Initially this expereince was building up in my head to be the most uncomfortable part of the whole process. Luckily the army doctor managed to morph the anxious feeling at the pit of my stomach, into slight disgust.

The man was sitting behind his desk with another future soldier, and whilst interviewing the 17-year-old his fingers where lodged so far up his nose that I was worried they would end up like the Chilean miners (before they got out). His fingers were digging for gold for more time than they were on his keyboard punching in the answers to his routine questions. I just thought to myself: “you’re gonna touch my jewels with those hands?”

Thinking about the bits of booger and snot that was going to end up on my junk distracted me from the idea of a strange man touching me. I was ready. It was going to be like pulling off a band aid… Only pulling down my pants… The only thing that ruined my train of thought was when he said “iz okay, iz okay” which sounded too similar to “me skuzy, me skuzy” (EuroTrip). A wave of violation swept over me along with a shiver of disgust.

So this is what it is to support Israel

Jerusalem Bombing

So a bomb goes off in one of your common hang-outs. You’re not actually there but on the TV screen you see a street sign which you recognise all too well and suddenly you’re at the scene. You recognise the number on the bus which tells you it is a route which travels through your neighbourhood. Its windows are shattered and tyres are tattered. Isles run red with blood, an image too graphic, too reminiscent of Ezekiel 28:23.

The corner stores on the edges of the black ash erratic circle, crudely drawn on the ground by the explosion are too familiar. You bought a bottle of water from that one last week. An apple from the one next door.

You watch as a volunteer on the street lowers a child’s blood soaked coat into a bin where a friend of yours butted out his cigarette the day before.

I’m not physically there, but my mind plays tricks by superimposing me sitting on the edge of the footpath behind the channel 2 news reporter. I see myself there because I was there. Not today, no in that hour, not in that split second where a woman took her last breath of city air, or when the driver punched a hole in that last ticket. The moment before fire and shards of the phone booth the bomb was attached to tore through the air, cutting and burning everything in its path. I wasn’t there then, but I am there now.

I’m sucked back into my sea in front of the TV, and in a whirl my mind flings me back to Sydney. I imagine seeing Bondi Junction in ruins like my bus station in Jerusalem. They are the same distance apart. My house in Vaucluse to the bus depot, my home in Jerusalem to the central bus station. I can see the 387 tilted on its side because it tires are shredded, glass on the seats from the shattered windows, identical to the seat I sat on my way to work.

I am not reminded of my mortality amidst all this. Yes I do feel slightly more alert and aware that any object on the street could be a death trap if someone is successful enough in hiding their home made bob. But I am more so reminded of why I came to this place, and I am glad that I don’t have that usual feeling in the pit of my stomach, feeling helpless as I sit behind the World section of the Saturday paper as I read about the attack, because I will get up tomorrow and ride the very bus which could have been blown up the day before, because I am Israeli, and we’re not going to stop our lives, in order to prolong them. For living in fear is worse than death.

International Women's Day

I feel it would be inappropriate for me to post a blog without mentioning International Women’s Day which came and went this past week. We’ve come a long way a people in terms of achieving equality between a number of things in West.

Women have the vote and we’re quite proud of that, but it has been quite a while since we’ve progressed any further than this point.  Hopefully next year we’ll have true equality!

REFUSER
From the Lebanese mountains
To the Kenyan village of El Doret
We are practicing self-defense
Versed in Karate, Tai Chi, Judo, and Kung Foo
We are no longer surrendering to our fate.

Now, we are the ones who walk our girl friends home from school.
And we don't do it with macho. We do it with cool.

Our mothers are the Pink Sari Gang
Fighting off the drunken men
With rose pointed fingers and sticks in
Uttar Pradesh.
The Peshmerga women
in the Kurdish mountains
with barrettes in their hair
and AK47's instead of pocket books.

We are not waiting anymore to be taken and retaken.

We are the Liberian women sitting
in the Africa sun blockading the exits
til the men figure it out.

We are the Nigerian women
babies strapped to out backs
occupying the oil terminals of Chevron.
We are the women of Kerala
who refused to let Coca Cola
privatize our water.
We are Cindy Sheehan showing up in Crawford without a plan.
We are all those who forfeited husbands boyfriends and dates
Cause we were married to our mission.
We know love comes from all directions and in many forms.
We are Malalai who spoke back to the Afghan Loya Jurga
And told them they were "raping warlords" and
She kept speaking even when they kept
trying to blow up her house.
And we are Zoya whose radical mother was shot dead when Zoya was only a child so she was fed on revolution which was stronger than milk

And we are the ones who kept and loved our babies
even though they have the faces of our rapists.

We are the girls who stopped cutting ourselves to release the pain
And we are the girls who refused to have our clitoris cut
And give up our pleasure.

We are:
Rachel Corrie who wouldn't couldn't move away from the Israeli tank.
Aung San Suu Kyi who still smiles after years of not being able to leave her room.
Anne Frank who survives now cause she wrote down her story.
We are Neda Soltani gunned down by a sniper in the streets of
Tehran as she voiced a new freedom and way
And we are Asmaa Mahfouz from the April 6th movement in Egypt
Who twittered an uprising.

We are the women riding the high seas to offer
Needy women abortions on ships.
We are women documenting the atrocities
in stadiums with video cameras underneath our Burqas.
We are seventeen and living for a year in a tree
And laying down in the forests to protect wild oaks.
We are out at sea interrupting the whale murders.
We are freegans, vegans, trannies
But mainly we are refusers.
We don't accept your world
Your rules your wars
We don't accept your cruelty and unkindness.
We don't believe some need to suffer for others to survive
Or that there isn't enough to go around
Or that corporations are the only and best economic arrangement
And we don't hate boys, okay?
That's another bullshit story.

We are refusers
But we crave kissing.
We don't want to do anything before we're ready
but it could be sooner than you think
and we get to decide
and we are not afraid of what is pulsing through us.
It makes us alive.

Don't deny us, criticize us or infantilize us.
We don't accept checkpoints, blockades or air raids
We are obsessed with learning.
On the barren Tsunamied beaches of Sri Lanka
In the desolate and smelly remains
Of the lower ninth
We want school.
We want school.
We want school.

We know if you plan too long
Nothing happens and things get worse and that
Most everything is found in the action
and instinctively we get that the scariest thing
isn't dying, but not trying at all.

And when we finally have our voice
and come together
when we let ourselves gather the knowledge
when we stop turning on each other
but direct our energy towards what matters
when we stop worrying about
our skinny ass stomachs or too frizzy hair
or fat thighs
when we stop caring about pleasing
and making everyone so incredibly happy-
We got the Power.

If
Janis Joplin was nominated the ugliest man on her campus
And they sent Angela Davis to jail
If Simone Weil had manly virtues
And Joan of Arc was hysterical
If Bella Abzug was eminently obnoxious
And Ellen Sirleaf Johnson is considered scary
If Arundhati Roy is totally intimidating
and Rigoberta Menchu is pathologically intense
And Julia Butterfly Hill is an extremist freak
Call us hysterical then
Fanatical
Eccentric
Delusional
Intimidating
Eminently obnoxious
Militant
Bitch
Freak
Tattoo me
Witch
Give us our broomsticks
And potions on the stove
We are the girls
who are aren't afraid to cook.

"Refuser" is published in Eve's newest work - I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World