Scaredy Cat

I feel like I'm letting fear overrun my life right now.

My fear of rejection, or, even worse, awkward and repetitive introduction conversations keep me from socializing much beyond my apartment. (Please, just don't make me repeat that I'm from Baltimore, Maryland- and yes, I may or may not know your Jewish friend that lives there, that I'm a junior, just here for a semester, not a year, I go to Carleton College, never heard of it? yeah, it's in Minnesota, yeah, it does get pretty darn cold up there and I'm in the third level of Ulpan, yes, I can understand everything pretty well, no, my verbal skills aren't quite up there, etc. etc.)

Worse than that, though, is my complete fear of speaking Hebrew. To be more specific, it's really more a of a fear of making a mistake. I know enough Hebrew to know when I'm saying something wrong. So, instead of asking a bus driver a rough translation of "do you walk/"go" to Mount Scopus" because I don't know the words for "do you stop/drive/does your route include Mount Scopus", I just won't ask. I'm more afraid of being the idiot who messes up her Hebrew phrases than just being the American tourist. The worst thing is when I know about half of the words in hebrew, so I start up in hebrew and then get stuck and have to switch to English. Wouldn't it just be easier to start in English and save myself the embarrassment?

But how can I not have this problem? I'm trained in Hebrew, sure, but it's academic Hebrew, not Hebrew for the market on Ben Yehuda. I can write a 10 page paper in Hebrew about the influence of Holocaust survivors on their children in Israeli literature and film, but I can't name all of the ingredients I want in my salad at lunch. I can read articles in newspapers or listen to an entire lecture and take out the main points, but I can't ask someone on the street how to get on a bus to get to the central bus station. I have no worries about my writing, Stacy's class more than prepared me, and it's shown by my essentially constant A's on all written assignments here. But I do this well because I understand construction, and I've mastered the dictionary. On the streets, in the market, on the bus, I can't write out a rough draft- I get one chance, and if I do it wrong I end up in Elat instead of Tel Aviv, with a pet chicken instead of a chicken sandwich for lunch. But at least when I get there I can tell the first Israeli I find the story we learned in Ulpan yesterday, of Alegra and Jabra and their forbidden Jewish-Christian love?