Tali's page

(This is not a picture of me, silly, but rather a famous painting of a geisha by Kitagawa Utamaro. Nonetheless, it is how I would like you to think of me.)

Hi, my name is Tali Cohen. I am 19 years old and live in Haifa, Israel. My hobbies are reading, poetry, swimming, and being with friends. I used to be on IRC a lot, mainly on #japan or #israel. Lately, I have stopped going there because I felt that I was getting too addicted to it. When I was on IRC, I used the IRC-nick Perach, which means "flower" or "blossom" in Hebrew, which is why I have that flower next to my name. In Japanese, "flower" is written like this: . I hope that you will see me, like that flower, blooming before your very eyes. My ambition in life is to be a virtual geisha! Yeah! No, all you sex-starved guys out there, a geisha doesn't do that! The word "geisha" means "beauty person" and what a geisha does is provide dreams and illusions. She entertains her client with total devotion: she can sing, she can play music on the shamisen, she can improvise poetry or tell stories, she can arrange flowers, she can write in beautiful calligraphy, and she can talk intelligently about any and every subject. She is kind, understanding, and mysterious if need be. Most importantly, she devoted to making her client feel that he is the most important person in the world. As you can imagine, that is pretty hard work and geishas have to train for years to be able to do it properly. I am just in the very very early stages of learning, and would not even dare to call myself a maiko -- or apprentice geisha -- at this stage.

These pages are about me. I am going to try and create a series of steps to understanding Tali. Maybe, by the time I finish, I will understand something about myself. Or both of us may end up more confused than before. That is a risk both of us must be prepared to take. These thoughts -- or more correctly, mere shades, shards, and jumbles of thoughts -- are being written down over time in a particular order. So, if you are interested in plumbing Tali's mind, and not just laughing at her pretentious silliness, please try to read them in the order they were written.

Many visitors to this page have asked me how I became fascinated with Japanese culture. An answer (or at least a partial answer), can be found here.

This page will always be under construction and deconstruction, because Tali too is always under construction and deconstruction. Please check back here from time to time to see the new things I have added.

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