A week of trying new things, by September blogger of the month Benzion Samueli

This was a week of trying new things. I learned a lot.

One. You can’t necessarily see the thorns on a cactus. And if you pick a cactus fruit from the plant and roll it around in your hands, you won’t necessarily feel the spikes immediately. It could take 20 or 30 minutes before your hand becomes inflamed from all of the prickles in your fingers.

Two. Cheap brandy is disgusting.

Three. When you send registered mail, only the post office from which you sent it has access to the information, and if it gets lost in Tel Aviv instead of being delivered to Jerusalem, you need to complete an investigation form in Be’er Sheva.

Four. There’s an xkcd for every situation. I found one that was relevant to today’s biostatistics class, another relevant to our Global Health lecture (the comic itself is a link to a really cool site), and another on people like me complaining about everything.

You may have noticed that my first two blogs were considerably longer than the third, which was a bit longer than this one. Explanation: medical school is hard, so I don’t have time to write full page parodies anymore. (And here we use A4 paper, which besides being mathematically a really cool size, it’s also longer and harder to fill than 8 ½ x 11.)

Now, I’d like to end off my blogger month on a serious, heart-warming note. (Also my lovely wife Rakefet told me that I should.) In truth, as much as I have been highlighting the strange/annoying parts of Israel in my posts, it’s just to be funny. I truly love Israel and Ben Gurion University is amazing. Professors invite their students to their homes for holiday meals. We’re all far away from our families, which is very difficult, but the closeness I have with my classmates makes it a bit easier. So I’d like to thank my parents for supporting me while I’m here, the New York office for making the application process affable, the Israeli staff & faculty for creating a good learning environment, and my lovely wife Rakefet tolerating my craziness.

Works Cited

“my lovely wife Rakefet” is a play on two things. One, Joel Stein always refers to “my lovely wife Cassandra” in his “The Awesome Column” on the second to last page of every TIME magazine, as well as in his blog More Stories About Some Kid. Furthermore, on the first week of classes, as everyone was meeting each other, I was told by several students, “your wife is lovely.” I told Rakefet and she didn’t believe me. Just as she was saying this, a classmate walked up to us and said, “Oh, is this your lovely wife Rakefet that I’ve been hearing about?” -blogger of the month Benzion Samueli