As a Cornell government major who likes to have fun, sleep and do other civilian things, I often find that the biggest obstacle I face is spontaneous political debates. Let’s face it, they suck. No one’s happy, no one’s convinced, and in the case of this past Tuesday night, I lost an hour of sleep. But when I got back to my room at 3:30 a.m., I felt strangely satisfied. The argument had been about everyone’s favorite topic these days, the Israel-Hezbollah war, and my friend had called me to join the conversation. I ended up discussing practically the entire history of the modern Middle East (also known as NES something or other) for an hour. I was arguing, as I tend to, for Israel’s right to exist, America’s positive relationship with it, I’m Jewish, we say these things, blah blah, etc.

After all this typical madness, I made it into bed and thought for a minute. Did I just waste an hour? I was tired. But I felt strangely satisfied, because I had done something that felt nationalistic. I was arguing on behalf of Israel, an activity which is, for people like me around the world, something natonalistic. As I fell asleep, my mind went back to a strange incident in July. Hereinafter — actually just this once — I will refer to it as the Strange Incident of the Filipinos in the Jerusalem Laundromat.

As the sun set on a blue sky, the way it does on literally every day of the Israeli/Palestinian summer, I walked into the dark laundromat to find all the machines were being used. I sat down next to these machine occupiers — wishing they might just liberalize and withdraw their clothes — and we began to talk. Ella and Ricky spoke flawless English. They were no American tourists, but Filipino migrant workers from Manila. In fact, Israel has a large population of Southeast Asian laborers who get temporary visas to go there and work. They are heavily and accurately stereotyped by job: the Filipinos in particular are almost all “caretakers” — live-in nurses for the old and infirm of that old city.

They explained that their economic situation in the Philippines had been so bad that they left. While many of their friends went to Europe and North America on similar temporary visas, these few came to Israel. I wasn’t quite sure why. Ricky told me, “Well, the pay is better — still not great … ” and feebly added, “you know, it’s the Holy Land too.” “Christian?” I asked. He shrugged, “Yes, not very religious.”

They seemed to feel a little bit out of place in the mostly Jewish West Jerusalem. It seemed like they wanted to — but could not really feel — at home, when they were only temps. Ricky explained to me that while they found the country very welcoming, this temporary visa thing angered him, and that they wanted to become citizens of Israel. But Ella confessed that Friday nights were lame because everything was shut down for the Sabbath; she said they felt a little bit caught in the middle in this Arab-Israeli conflict, a war ridiculously made theirs only by their Filipino friends’ deaths at the hands of Hamas suicide bombers; and she said that they missed their families at home. I nodded, thought vaguely of freshman year, then decided they were nothing alike.

I had this terrible feeling that these people had been robbed of something. They were Filipinos, right? But they were exiles. Something like Sting’s “Englishman in New York.” It’s not that diversity is something so new in Jerusalem or almost anywhere today. It was more that these people had left their islands along with the other 8 million overseas Filipinos; they didn’t want to go back. And they had done so, they said, because they needed better jobs. Were they robbed of the right to live among their nation by economic necessity? (I’m not sure “self-imosed refugee” status has made it into the UN handbook.) Or were they robbed of a nation itself by 400 years of imperialist Western rule? Or, my hippy side asked, did they care too much about money, foolishly leaving their family and friends for it? How sad, I thought, that all these people leave home. In fact, Israel also has a huge exile population — Israeli-born people you might run into selling Dead Sea salt in little kiosks at the mall or just chillin’ in the mountains of Nepal and India.

I guess, in the end, everyone’s unique circumstance dictates whether they want to leave home. Sometimes you don’t even know where home is. Standing there sweating in that Laundromat, I felt pretty lucky to have a nation I didn’t need or want to run away from. And hell, here I was, the American Jew in Jerusalem! So I’m not even sure which nation I’m talking about! This identity stuff is complicated, especially when you’re a freshman plopped in the Big Red Melting Pot and all you want is acceptance. But somewhere you have your people, and they get together and do stuff. They could be five Italian-Americans drinking Italian sodas or American sodas, or the entire population of Colombia belting its anthem. Class of 2010, try doing something with your people. Check out your Pakistani, Russian or Catholic student association — be a part. Just the (proverbial) tip. Just for a minute. Just to see how it feels.

I hope, in the coming months, to be sharing my thoughts with you all about cosmic kinds of things like nationalism and religion [Cosmology n 1: the metaphysical study of the origin and nature of the universe.] But to reduce the risk of being dull, oppressive or annoying, I’ll hope to serve it up on the rocks. Yea — that means stray expletives, colloquial flava and, as I learned in AlcoholEDU, alternating the hard stuff with something soft so as not to get too intoxicated with those cosmos. Or Cosmos, or whatever.

Jeremy Siegman is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at jas367@cornell.edu. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays.