Eat your heart out, America. All soldiers in combat units get it automatically here, so I got lucky. Also, this is my last week in the army! That's pretty exciting for me cause I'm totally sick of the grind of being in the army. I have the GMAT in mid-november, so studying for that has already started and will hit full throttle next week. Due to all this madness I haven't been very on top of updating this blog. I'll tell some fun army stories in the near future. Also, there is this song by a new band called Fiasco that I am totally crazy about. They band sounds like everything I loved about 80's music, so go to their www site and listen to the them (the music starts playing automatically at the main page) if you think you might dig it.

Time management is easily one of the most important things people in there army need to learn as quickly as possible. For some, this isn't the time management you might thing, rather, how best to use the numerous excuses at your disposal to get out of being at your base. First of all, it's always preferable to use these days at times when it adds to your weekend (generally, Sundays or Thursdays). It's also a plus if the excuse you are using is actually legit. Having an appointment with an army doctor/dentist/lawyer are all good examples of legitimate excuses. Another factor to consider is what time of day the appointment is for (and I don't even care that I just ended that sentence with a preposition). If you don't sleep at your base (like myself), it's ideal to make sure the appointment is at the right time to get you the most value. You want it to be late enough that you will get plenty of extra sleep, but still early enough that your commander won't get any crazy ideas about trying to get you to go to your base before the appointment. You also need it to be late enough that you can use the time wasted dealing with the bureaucracy as an excuse to not have to go to your base after your appointment, as well. When you tell your commander about the appointment, it's best to say something like "it was the only time they had in the next month" to deflect attention from the fact that you are using this as an excuse to, in essence, have a vacation day.

...with all this in mind, I scheduled myself an appointment to take the allergy test recently in an effort to solve the mystery of my constantly itchy nose once and for all (the appointment was on a Sunday at 10:45am, naturally). The place where they did the test was in Haifa at the main branch of the largest of the four HMO's that serve the country.

This is the Clalit Health Services building in which I took my test. It's interesting because it is such a common architectural style in Israel. The basic premise of the style was "do as much as you can with only concrete to work with." The reason behind it was the desire to get the infrastructure the country needed in place as quickly, cheaply, and permanently as possible. In every major city in Israel there is a neighborhood that has a few of these large infrastructure-necessary buidlings in it, which means that this was the main part of that city during the birth of the country (there is a really famous example of this at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, as well).


So this is what my army looked like five minutes after the nurse gave me the test (and she was the one that doodled on me with the pen, in case you were wondering. I guess she needed targets). At this point, my army was already reacting pretty strongly to "dust," with "mold" and "cat" just beginning to itch as well. I had another 15 minutes to go until I could go back into the doctor to be looked at, and by this time my arm was so large and red that I was way past being interested in taking more picture and was instead focused on how long my arm was going to feel like it was on fire (the answer turned out to be "a few hours").

So mystery solved! I'm allergic to dust, cats, and mold. See as how Israel has no shortage of dust and I love cats, this certainly explains why my nose is always itchy. I actually asked the doctor afterwards if I will ever be able to live with a cat later in life and he just started laughing. When he saw that I was serious, he promptly told me that it's not a good idea. That's a shame. Anyhow, the solution to all this was to give me pills, nose spray, and eye drops. Guess they don't have anything for me if my ears start itching.