[Thanks to our wonderful Israeli line producer, Nir Weiss, I’m back online. As much as my shoot schedule permits, I’ll be posting here near-daily, and on Cyan’s site two or three times a week. To all those who emailed in the interim since my last post with their advice: yes, I promise I’ll try really hard not to get blown up.]

“Nes gadol haya sham.”

I recited those Hebrew words while growing up, year after year, prompted each hanukkah by the first letters – ‘nun’, ‘gimmel’, ‘hey’ and ‘shin’ – that in turn adorn the four sides of the dreidels my family would pull out of a box in our garage. Nes gadol haya sham – a great miracle happened there.

In short, that’s what hanukkah – like most other Jewish holidays – is about; memorializing a great miracle that kept the Jewish people alive, century in and century out, despite the best efforts of countless civilizations. Still, in the case of hanukkah, which celebrates the successful revolt of the Maccabees, the miracle we celebrate isn’t the suprising, David-and-Goliath-esque military victory, but rather a much smaller one.

When the Maccabee rebels returned to their Great Temple after tossing the greeks, they found the place ransacked, the Neir Tamid – the Eternal Light – extinguished, with barely enough oil left in the one unbroken flask to last a few hours. Yet, through the eight days it took them to pick and press olives, to replenish their oil supply, the single flask burned on.
From that, then, Hanukkah – eight days, a festival of lights. Yet, in the bigger picture of their against-the-odds win, that little miracle seems, well, not all that miraculous. But, perhaps, that’s the entire point – a miracle of any size is a miracle none the less.

While growing up, I remember each year being told that, In Israel, dreidels differ slightly – the letter ‘pey’ replaces ‘shin’, the stood-for word ‘po’ replaces ‘sham’. Nes gadol haya po – a great miracle happened here. In this very place.

I thought of that today as I drove back from Ben Gurion Airport towards Tel Aviv. I had just sent out Chris, our director, and the Israeli crew that will be following him, off to Newcastle, to shoot Sakhnin’s UEFA game later this week. As we had been running behind on our way to the airport – we wanted to get there in time to film the team’s bus pulling up – I had given in to the urgings of my car-ull of Israelis, and driven straight through, despite the nearly-empty state of my car’s gas tank.

The fuel light had come on well before we arrived at the airport, and, on my way back, the needle was dipping further and further below the empty line. I drove along the highway to Tel Aviv, looking desperately ahead for signs of roadside gas stations on the horizon. But, not only were there not any gas stations, there weren’t even any exits – aside from junctions for equally large highways shooting off towards the desert on either side – for tens of miles.

By the time I pulled off the highway onto the first exit I could find, the car was already beginning to slow slightly – my top speed had dropped to maybe sixty kilomters per hour. And, as I drove, increasingly slowly, down block after block of the small road I had exited onto, the odds of finding a gas station seemed increasingly slim. The small commercial strip gave way to sparse apartment complexes, and handfuls of industrial buildings.

Still, knowing I certainly didn’t have enough fuel to return to highway speed, I kept pushing forward. I was doing thirty kilometers an hour at best, but the car kept going, one painful mile at a time. Finally, some ten minutes after I had turned onto the road, I caught sight of a gas station far up on the left. Ever slower, I rolled forward, my eye on the glowing sign ahead.

By the time I pulled in, the engine was knocking, and I was barely doing five kilometers an hour. But I managed to roll the car up alongside the pump. As I stepped out of the car, breathing in the beautiful smell of petrol, I thought about those Israeli dreidels. Nes gadol haya po. A great miracle happened here. Apparently they still do.

A few weeks back, I wrote that I was thinking about taking a month and moving somewhere other than New York, for no real reason other than that I could. And while I threw out a number of possibilities – New Orleans, Vancouver, Rome – a small Arab town in the far north of Israel wasn’t really on the list.

None the less, it appears that’s what’s on the slate – on rather short notice, I’ll be headed off to Sakhnin, a small village deep in the heart of the Galilee, for about a month.

I wasn’t, at first, thrilled about that, but the more I’ve marinated in the fact of the trip, the more excited I’ve become. Sure, given the choice, I’d have had a bit more time to prep, to temporarily close out the loose ends of my New York life. But, in the end, there’s very little I won’t be able to push forward by email and phone.

So, consider this official notice. By the end of the week, this blog will switch from a collection of the misadventures of a young New Yorker, to a collection of the misadventures of a young New Yorker who just happens to be living in Middle-of-Nowhere, Israel. If only just for a month.

Assuming I can get all the internet access stuff worked out, blogging should continue (relatively) uninterrupted. Though, as early disclaimer, I should point out that drastic change of scene doesn’t always help ongoing programming; just think of Saved by the Bell: The College Years.

Despite my earlier belief that I’d be back in New York for a (reasonably) extended stretch, it appears I’m bound back for Israel (and possibly England) by the middle of next week.

And despite, by now, having become used to travel, to juggling jobs and films and responsibilities, I increasingly feel as though I’m falling slightly further behind with each step. Friends and colleagues have started telling me I look stressed out, tired, and generally on the verge of cracking.

So, at this point, my choices seem to be:

A. Slog through, ever harder, in the hopes of making it to a quieter stretch.
B. Give up completely and retire to a forsaken upland hermitage.
C. Invent a machine to periodically freeze time so I can take advantage of the pauses and catch back up.

Clearly, option C is where I’ll be focusing my energy.

Escaping the thunderstorms and humidity, I’m off to California for a week of tech-dork consulting, meeting with animation firms for a possible upcoming Cyan film, and (most importantly) honing my trumpet skills at the Stanford Jazz Workshop.

Posts, I realize, have been a bit sparse of late, but I’m trying to get back to a daily schedule. Also, as things are gearing up for a Cyan documentary that starts shooting next week in Israel (yes, kids, I’m racking up the frequent-flyer miles like a pro), I should also be writing regularly in my movie mogul alter-ego at www.cyanpictures.com.

Over the past few years, I’ve been spending an increasing percentage of my time on the road – a trend that looks likely to continue, as, just in the next month, I’m slated to head out to Washington (D.C.), San Francisco, Israel and Bermuda. (Rough, I know.)

Through all my traveling thus far, I’ve made a few discoveries. The first, that I don’t need that much ‘stuff’ to be happy, is immensely pleasing in a Walden-esque sort of way. Living out of suitcases, I find I rarely miss the things I’ve left behind. Which has inspired me, already a ruthless reducer of possessions, to further clean out my closets.

Another thing I’ve noticed, however, is that trips of different lengths seem to have different feels to them. For vacations, very short trips (three to five days) seem to work best for me. After that, any additional relaxation I gain from pulling myself out of real life accrues increasingly slowly with each added day – a textbook case of diminishing returns. Worse, I start to find that all of the work I managed to push completely out of my head for the first few days begins to creep back in, preventing me from fully enjoying my escape.

As a result, I’ve realized I’m better breaking two weeks of yearly vacation into three or four shorter trips, spread through the year. Each one, then, is just long enough for me to pull myself completely out of my fast-paced life, and comes frequently enough that I rarely have to go for extended stretches without an upcoming escape in sight.

Five days, I’ve found, is also long enough to do the tourist thing in a city I’ve never before visited – long enough to see the sites, wander through a few museums, browse thorough kitschy knick-knacks I fortunately never purchase. Even doubling that to ten days, I’ve found, makes very little difference. Sure, I get to see a few more sights, perhaps wander more slowly through the museums. But, by the end, I still feel like a tourist – with a vague sense of the city, perhaps, but certainly not like I really know it.

At the one month, mark, however, I’ve found that I start to feel like I really own a city – I have a sense of the neighborhoods, have found a few off-the-beaten-path secret spots, get some sort of feel for the city as a whole. It’s a completely different feeling from the touristy shorter trips, and I find that when I return to a city I’ve lived in – even lived in for just a one month stretch – it feels slightly more like a homecoming than an outbound visit.

I really like that homecoming feeling, and, as I’m lucky enough have jobs (both on the film and tech sides) that can be done pretty much anywhere, it’s something I’ve recently resolved to experience more often. So, along with my business trips, along with my frequent short vacations, I’ll also be trying to take a month a year to live and work someplace I’ve never lived and worked before. With Manhattan rents so ridiculously high, I suspect I can sublet my apartment, and use the income to cover not only rent in another city, but even the cost of a flight to get there.

I can’t relocate for a month immediately, as I’ll be all over the place for the next three (mostly related to two tech consulting gigs and a documentary we’re getting ready to shoot in Israel and Europe). But my schedule should calm down by November, and I’m hoping to use that eye in the work storm to test out the one month move plan. So, after that exceedingly long-winded introduction, I should now admit that the entire point of this post is to ask for help in determining exactly where I should relocate.

Currently, at the top of my list are Vancouver, the French Quarter of New Orleans, and possibly Paris. My roommate James is lobbying hard for Asheville, NC (‘the Paris of the South’). But it’s still pretty much up in the air. So, if you have ideas, throw ’em in the fray (ideally with some explanation of why I should choose that locale). If you convince me, I’ll even break from tradition, finally buying one of those kitschy knick-knacks to send back as thanks.

-The students at the University of Denver take working out very, very seriously. It seems to be the campus religion. Consequently, the main topic of discussion on campus is currently: guys shaving their chests – still Abercrombie cool or sooo 2003?
-Second to working out appears to be cars. To DU students, what you drive and how much you’ve tweaked your rig are incredibly central aspects of who you are. DU students drive everywhere – I’ve seen students who live a few blocks off campus drive to class, parking their cars further from the classroom then they would have been had they just walked from home.
-Still, as drunk driving can be hazardous to your vehicle, the students are willing to walk to bars. Or, rather, bar, as there appears to be only one immediately adjacent to campus. The Border, a quintessential over-packed collegiate dive bar, is inevitably the final evening stop, no matter where else people have gone that evening, nor how drunkenly they’re forced to stagger down the street to get there. Once they arrive, however, my brother and his friends immediately fall into Border ritual: swaying unsteadily in the long line outside, complaining bitterly about the $2 cover, elbowing their way to the bar for a watery Red Bull and vodka, making one or two laps around the bar (stopping occasionally to hug girls whose names they’re no longer sure of), then proclaiming the completely packed scene “totally broke”, and heading home no more than twenty minutes after they came in the door.
-I am exceedingly dubious of sushi in landlocked states.

Finally back East, after several weeks on the West Coast – a bit of that in LA, though most up in San Francisco. The trip was the longest stretch I’d spent in the Bay Area in several years, and refreshed for me a number of lessons blunted by the seven years spent living on the other side of the country. To wit:

1. While San Francisco thinks it has a public transportation, in reality, the BART, Metro and bus systems are merely sufficient to mock you with their inadequacy.

2. As a result, everyone drives. Yet, somehow, there are literally and absolutely no available parking spaces in the entire city. The few overpriced garages that do exist are guaranteed to be no fewer than ten or fifteen blocks from whichever bar you were hoping to attend.

3. Gay men love me. In the explanatory words of one drunk San Franciscan who spent the night hitting on me (including, at one point, while standing at the adjacent urinal in the bathroom, walking over to show me he was pierced): “The only thing gay guys like more than a cute gay guy is a cute straight guy who looks like he might be willing to experiment.” Thanks, I think.

4. Most women actually look much better when not caked under a layer of makeup and squeezed into black pants and a tube top.

5. My trusty Timbuk2 bag is neither as cool nor as unique as living in New York might lead one to believe.

6. San Francisco is, despite the constant whining of its residents to the contrary, cheap. At several bars, I was able to buy three beers with a $10 and still have enough change for a generous tip. In at least half the bars in New York City, that $10 wouldn’t buy you the first pint.

7. In San Francisco, irony isn’t dead; it simply seems to have never caught on in the first place. God bless you, lack of trucker hats!

8. People… talk… much… slower. Case in point: At a business presentation I gave to a group of investors, the moderator announced that I was nearly out of time. “That’s fine,” I joked, “I’ll just talk quicker.” “God help us,” heckled someone in the audience.

I’m up in Vermont for two nights, having been flown in as a guest speaker by Middlebury College’s film department. The school has kindly booked me into the Inn on the Green, a quaint bed and breakfast overlooking the town. Outside my window, a light snow is falling on a foliage tableau so picturesque as to be nearly painful.

Wrapped in a comforter, lying across the bed, tapping away at my laptop to finish the day’s work, I catch myself repeatedly looking up, marveling at the beauty of the autumnal scene outside my window, at the enveloping stillness of this little river town, at the stars, bright and clear above, that seem to have aligned over my apparently rather charmed life.