freiers, they "who only stand and wait"

I live in Israel, I work in Israel, I speak Hebrew and shop in Israeli stores and travel Israeli roads to work five days a week. I'm married to an Israeli, for heaven's sake, and am the mother of a sabra. And yet I seem to float somewhere just off to the side of "Israel". This is the nature of the squarepeg. How is this possible? My life is intertwined yet uninvolved.

Usually I notice the habits of the natives with barely a raise of the eyebrows, and have in many ways probably melted into this pot more than I even realize. But today I was especially struck with how Israelis are inveterate, unapologetic interrupters. Okay, once in a while they'll interrupt with a perfunctory "sorry for the interruption bla bla bla bla...[continuing without a break]," but much of the time they'll just walk in and start talking over the person who's in the middle of talking. As if to say, "my mother taught me that I'm the center of the universe and until proven otherwise, that works for me." Depending on the arrogance quotient of the interrupter, I can get pretty irritated by this behavior, I have to admit. It's one thing that still shocks me nearly speechless. Probably that has something to do with the fact that being interrupted has a tendency to kill my notoriously slippery train of thought.

Today I was just amused, however, when I was in the middle of consulting with our office manager on the best way to bind a large stack of papers, when a colleague came along and, all urgency-and-time-is-of-the-essence, cut off our almost-finished conversation with his own needs. Going directly into anthropological mode (this time), I stood to the side while the office manager turned her attention to the interrupter, only to be re-interrupted after about 30 seconds by a man who she'd just opened the door for. He immediately started telling her something and she gave him her full attention for about a minute, then walked back to her desk with interrupter no. 1 now continuing with what he needed. This only lasted a few more seconds, though, because another colleague then came by and immediately started in on what she wanted, pretend-apologizing for the inconsequential interruption -- after all, we were obviously just wasting time, while her needs were extremely time-sensitive.

At times like this, I feel very Canadian. Canadians are known for their almost pathological politeness -- two people brush past each other gently and both say, "sorry!" where smashing past each other in this country warrants no acknowledgment whatsoever; and don't even get me started on the driving habits -- but it's at least a relaxing sort of pathology. Waiting in orderly lineups is pointedly un-Israeli, but even waiting to speak to someone while they finish a previous conversation is a skill not mastered by the majority.

We may be in the Middle-East, but the manners are all Wild West.