all those annoying things

Having had to work over 12 hours this week plus these past two Fridays, left me little leisure time. Just Saturdays. So I get impatient with everything. And my boss, equally impatient snaps at the receptionist when he asked for a folder because she brought in a red folder. She should know better than that. No red waving in front of a bull. He hollered "Why do you have to bring me this color? Isn't there another color - like blue or white." He must have been feeling overly patriotic today.

I had called Rabbis for Human Rights after receiving an e-mail that they were setting up people for Friday night meals from The Fellowship of Reconciliation group. I quickly took on 3 guests even though time was limited.

"You've invited strangers?" asked one of my collegues at work.

Anyone in a group with a name like Peace, Reconciliation, Interfaith, Dialogue - is hardly a candidate for being a rapist or a mass murderer. I figured it was safe to invite this group of strangers.

We hadn't had strangers in our house since November and it was high time we did something about it.

I prepared a marathon cooking session - even bribing my kids to clean the house for $12. The volunteer was Nasty Daughter who muttered complaints throughout her cleaning session, but was happy to earn cigarette money from me. I got frustrated at squeezing the orange juice from oranges that didn't have seeds which meant I would have used them for eating oranges. But everytime I cut up an orange for eating, I get a mouthful of pits, so I didn't want to chance it this time and delegated all of them to be juice oranges.

I went back to Jerusalem at 4:30 to meet our guests who were at that "touchy-feely" Reform Synagogue, leaving instructions for kids and Hubby not to burn the house down and to wash the floors, clean the bathroom and shut off the stove so the chicken won't turn into ashes.

The place glowed when I got home with our guests. Apparently their group is one of the oldest interfaith groups in the US, which formed after WWI. Because of hassles at Ben Gurion airport - because they are a Peace group, they flew into Jordan and from there drove to Jerusalem. Apparently the delegation before theirs got turned back because the Israeli officials don't take too nicely to people who fraternize with Palestinians. Then foreigners might realize how nice Palestinian families are and then all that hard government work to make them all seem like terrorists, will be for naught.

This had been their first visit with a Jewish family since they had always been hosted by Palestinian families since they arrived.

At dinner time, Hubby hogged the conversation with lengthy stories about "his life" which seemed really really long - maybe because I've heard them for hours on end before. Maybe because I was very tired and impatient and wanted to hog the guests for myself because "I" invited them and he didn't even want them there in the first place because he was tired himself. But our guests really didn't seem to mind. He was peppering his "sermons" with "I am honored by your presence" about a hundred times, which got on my nerves, because that morning he asked me to cancel the guests. Like fuck you're honored. And he sounded so uncharacteristically mushy, I wondered if the Brandy his brother bought for him at Duty Free was having this effect on him. I was in the middle of putting together my Indonesian Rice Salaed and I hear him continue "and as you are amongst us...". "Amongst"??? Who talks like this in the 21st century? I didn't make any comments, but I shot him a glare.
I did manage to get a word in now and then. And then I think the highlight of the evening was when Hubby brought out his gas mask to show everyone what it looks like (scary) and the atrophine (sp?) injection in that box as well.

After 3 hours I gave our guests my business card before seeing them off. Hubby got back at me for all those glares and my cutting his conversations short.

"Oh you're giving them your FAKE business cards?"

At least my kids behaved like civilized human beings at the table and I can't be so totally annoyed at Hubby because he did show up and entertain my guests and didn't retreat into his cave early like he usually does. And for that - I was grateful.