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Who am I?

Hi. My name's Mory. This is my blog, but I don't know if I really have all that much to say. I could probably tell you almost everything there is to know about me in a single post, that's how simple a person I am. You know what, I think I'll do that. Is that okay with you? And then if you're interested in reading more I can get to all the babbling about other stuff, because babbling about whatever's on my mind is really what this blog is for. And if you decide I'm really boring, because it's a really simple story, then you can leave after this post. Okay? Good.

The first thing I have to say about myself is that I'm pretty good at figuring out how to use various systems. By "systems" I'm not talking about mechanical stuff, I'm talking more about how to do things. You know, like when I was 3 I taught myself to read. That sort of thing. I just tried to understand it, and I did. Most of the things that we think are really complicated are actually quite understandable and approachable if you take the time to observe and imitate them.

I lived in America for the first seven years of my life. Back then I loved to run and jump and read and sing, and I did that everywhere. Even in class, when I was old enough to go to class but not old enough to be told that you don't do that sort of thing in class. School didn't make much of an impression on me, since the whole "I talk, you listen" routine didn't speak to me. But there were some times when they'd have us figure out how to do things ourselves, like writing poetry or stuff like that, and I liked that. Back then I was a part of the group. I had friends, I talked to everyone. It wasn't exactly fulfilling being in the first grade, but it wasn't bad.

Then we moved to Israel. There wasn't one group anymore, there were really three. There were the English-speakers, there were the bullying Hebrew-speakers, and there were the native English-speakers who only ever spoke in Hebrew so that they'd fit into the environment better. I was in the first group, and my in-class behavior (running around, singing out loud, etc.) got me in a lot of trouble with the second group. I picked up the rules of speaking in Hebrew quickly, but it's one thing to understand the rules and it's another to have a vocabulary. I wasn't eager to hang out with the people who made fun of me and spent the classes throwing things at me, so I never built up that vocabulary.

On the rare occasions in class that I tried to pay attention, I found that I could only understand half of what was being said. And when I absolutely had to break apart from the English-speaking group for a moment and answer someone in Hebrew, I found that I only knew half the words I needed to say. (I could have read Hebrew books and built up a vocabulary, but I never did.) So I came to see myself as an outsider, and tried to take comfort in my distance from the crowd.

That hasn't worked out so well. In ninth grade I was in a school with lots of interesting artistic types, but they were Hebrew-speakers so I kept my distance. In eleventh grade I finally got to be in a class with girls, but they were all Hebrew-speakers so I kept my distance. Now I sit at home and interact with a small community of fellow Orthodox-Jewish English-speakers and hope no one will make me leave. To this day, whenever I pass a group of Hebrew-speaking teenagers on the street I have the sense that they're secretly laughing at me.

I've figured out how to play with lots of different systems over the years: music composition, acting, weird blogging, comics editing. But those are just fun things to do so that I don't get bored. My love is for videogames, and you know it's real love because I don't really enjoy making games but I force myself to do it anyway. Videogames are so diverse that I can imitate absolutely any kind of system, no matter how random, and make a game out of it. So that never gets old, and you can see why I love it so much. But since I'm an outsider I have to do all the tedious work myself, and that's most of the job. It's worth it, anyway.

So that's me. (See, I told you it wouldn't take long.) Now that you know everything there is to know about me, you can stay and read some stuff or not, I mean, at this point you can definitely make an informed opinion about whether you hate my guts or are mildly curious about what I'll do next. Welcome to my blog.