Wrong Side of the Bed all Week

I’m fantasizing-about-shooting-out-the-new-security-lamp-that-blares-light-into-my-
bedroom-window-all-night tired. (After all, handguns are now legal in DC!)

I’m wanting-to-hold-crying-baby-out-of-the-window-over-the-truckbed-of-the-truck-
parked-six-inches-from-my-head-into-which-someone-is-throwing-lead-pipes-at-
4-in-the-morning-and-yell-“see-what-you’ve-done!” tired.

I’m I-think-my-baby-is-having-nightmares-because-she-screams-bloody-murder-in-
intervals-of-15-minutes-for-a-couple-of-hours-each-night tired. (I really wish some Shabbat guests last year hadn’t been so specific about the ways in which the house I see through our bedroom window is haunted). I already did my time with colic. This isn’t fair!!

I’m we-must-squeeze-40-hours-in-the-office-into-4-long-days-so-our-fabulous-
nanny-only-has-to-work-four-days-and-then-I-work-from-her-bedtime-till-
midnight-every-night tired.

I’m my-baby-gets-up-at-6am-no-matter-what-time-she-goes-down tired.

I-feel-too-guilty-to-hire-a-babysitter-for-fun-or-for-napping tired.

I’m a terrible, awful, irritable person without sleep. I did okay the first 8 or 9 months of my daughter’s life. I knew the sleeplessness was temporary….but shouldn’t temporary mean it ends at some point?

The sleeping woes are paralleled by an amazing string of financial weirdness. In the span of 6 months (and I love Israel, but) I’ve:

1. been withheld pay at the Israel university for 3 extra months since “because of the strike” they enter the names in payroll “according to alphabetical order,” not according to which semesters you actually teach. My question is: do they use left-handed scribes and do it by hand?

2. once that was straightened out, I was only paid half my salary (how did they do that?) I’m still waiting...

3. been overcharged by 30% on my Israel apartment; it was corrected slowly over the course of the rental by bizarre accounting that made me suspect someone was cooking the books. I mean, even I, with my unique-and-one-of-a-kind-crazy-method of algebra couldn’t dream up accounting like that.

4. The last three times I’ve been to the grocery store the bill is wrong. You feel really petty making the cashier give you back $2.36 or something, but if this happens to you once a week….well, YOU do the math. I used to take a casual glance at the receipt…now I really look.

I hate math. I hate it. In high school physics I used to do the problems correctly and come up with the wrong answers because I’D PUNCHED THE WRONG NUMBERS ON THE CALCULATOR…..

5. Finally, one learns that the Amazon.com City Bank Visa makes it extremely difficult to investigate fraudulent charges on one’s credit card when one is in Israel… Also, one discovers that all their telephone support is snippy and unhelpful, and their online bill site was down for three months.

Worse than the sleep deprivation is having to stop being the impractical sort-of-flighty person I sometimes was in the past. It makes me so alarmed I’m going to lose all of my soul and funk (oh, I also got a horrible haircut this week….took off about 8 inches, and I only wanted a trim, and now it’s short, which means it’s poofy!!!). There was nothing to do but eat cookie-dough ice cream and cherries for supper. This grown up stuff is waaaaaaaay overrated.