summer missing...

My friend that told me that whenever she gets homesick, and sees a SuperPharm Pharmacy in Israel, she goes in, just to feel like she’s home. Superpharm is the Israeli brand of the Canadian Shoppers Drug Mart.

I am also starting to feel a little homesick this year as the summer kicks into full swing.
It’s that time of year again, when everyone you know starts to talk about their elaborate summer plans. Most of the international students (and by that I mean the English speaking ones that are my friends), at the university fly home after exams for weeks, even months.

This is the first summer ever, well, probably since those diapered pre-nursery days that I actually have no summer plans whatsoever.

I work full time now. My life doesn’t come with built-in vacations anymore.

When you work, you can’t just leave your current vocation and live a quarter of the year in a different country. I’m not flying back to my hometown Toronto this summer. I am convincing myself that I am perfectly happy, as a citizen and resident of Israel, to stay put and enjoy the summer locally.

This would be a great plan, if it were not for the following two points:

One is that Tel Aviv is so unbelievably hot. You feel as if you are constantly sleep-walking in a human size oven that has been pre-heated. You find yourself planning your walking paths to the grocery store around the corner according to most shade available en route. You become so drenched in sweat, only minutes after leaving the house, that you wonder whether your deodorant is really perfumed water in a can. From May till November you won’t see a cloud in this Mediterranean sky. I’ve talked to Israelis about the weather here, comparing it to Toronto. We’ve discussed the classic summer weather cycle in Toronto. The buildup of humidity, more clouds, unbearable humidity, and then after waiting for days, the heat breaks, and it rains such a lovely calming summer rain. They look at me bewildered. “Rain in the summer?!? How can it rain in the summer? What do you wear, long or short sleeves?” They don’t seem to understand the concept of precipitation when the barometer reads over 20 degrees.

The second reason why my plan is doomed to fail is because, when July and August roll around, you suddenly find that the rest of the country flies out in a mass exodus. The streets are bare, and the banks are open only one hour a day instead of the normal two. Everyone in the office discusses their summer plans, and stares at me in disbelief when I tell them that I’m not going anywhere this year.

To top it all off, I heard today that even the dead sea scrolls took a 6 month vacation to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

I think that maybe I’ll just take a little trip to the pharmacy to get a whiff of what being back in Canada would smell like…

To Build, or not to build?

We all started getting our nails built at around the same time. My older sister, the self-care guru in our family, decided that it was something that we all must do. Naturally, we immediately ran after her into the stylish lure of acrylics and gels. After my first experience at the ‘salon’, my nails were quite sharp. I wondered how it is that nail-building is legal, although there is something to be said for having ten sharp weapons, ready on demand, at your fingertips. Literally.

At the beginning, I fell in love with the tap-tap-tap that my nails made on hard surfaces. It became an empowering part of who I was. Women who noticed my nails would comment enviously “oh, you got your nails done!” and I would reply, ever so nonchalantly, that my nails are always done. I would run home from an appointment, and show my husband the new design etched into my cuticles. He would nod his head in agreement (although slightly unconvincingly) that they are so very worth it. I must admit, that every once in a while I would look over at my hands, and not recognize my own nails -- but I truly came to appreciate them.

The salon experience was quite what I expected from the Israeli service industry. The nail lady claimed that I have very sensitive skin, as she filed away in every direction, completely missing the nail most of the time. Perhaps my skin would not have been so “sensitive” had you not been on the phone, I wanted to say. But I kept quiet. (It pays to be in your manicurist’s good books.)

What they don’t tell you is that once you’ve started doing it, you can never stop. Your nails grow (and you notice) like never before. Every chip, every scratch, can turn a bright happy day, into a depressing misery. You wait and long to get another chance, to make them perfect again. They are thick, and difficult to maneuver. Day-to-day activities, such as pulling small pieces of lettuce out of your teeth, or picking spare change off the ground after it’s fallen at the grocery store checkout (and everyone is waiting for you), become chores. And yet, you remain committed to an everlasting program of filing, gluing, brushing, and painting.

It was after half a year of this addictive routine that I decided “enough! I will no longer be a slave to my nails”. I knew that I was making the right decision, but I had so many worries. What would my nails look like when I came out of this on the other side?
Above all, I was scared that, by leaving it all behind, I would endure shame by telling my manicurist that I was leaving her.

And so it is with mixed feelings of sadness and great trepidation, that I bid adieu to my beautiful artificially-strengthened nails, and move on to other beauty care routines.