Books and chats
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I had yet another "Oh, you're Rebecca's brother" moment today at the post office when I met her friend, Neely (sic). She heard my name as I was collecting the first half of my recent order of books and DVDs from Amazon and recognized it as Becca's maiden name. With no other introduction, she simply stated, "You're Rebecca's brother." "Yes, I am," said I, with little surprise. After the briefest of introductions, she wandered off, and I finished receiving my package. But as I was tearing the box open to see the order of the episodes on the Wonderfalls DVDs (the proper order in which to watch my low-quality, bootleg copies of the episodes is rather suspect in some cases), she appeared once more. We chatted a bit about the quantities of the taxes applied to imported items in Israel, and collectively decided that the 17% VAT tax in my case wasn't too grievous an offense, considering that far worse tariffs are far from unknown.
Afterward, I went to a falafel stand to indulge in a slightly overdue morning repast. There I met a married woman named Shira who was somewhat pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it was for me to ship stuff to Israel from Amazon in the US. She was nice company and I thought it was too bad that I didn't have any topics with which to prolong the conversation to fill the time while she waited for her order.