The first thing I did on Yom Kippur after leaving my parent’s house was take a shit. I ate like a pig the entire day in prep for a 24 hour fast, but my fast metabolism took about 30 minutes to go “Come on. You’re not a camel, nor a bear getting ready for winter. Let’s get it out of your system.”

Usually on the toilet I just scroll idly on my phone, but for the same reason I was fasting I could not use any electronic devices. So, I decided to pick up one of the books on my shelf, oldschool-style. I looked for a light read, both weight-wise and topic-wise, and what caught my eye was a small green handbook written by my good friend Finel for one of his college classes:

Let’s Sit On It - a bench-ranking book.

The book is a 135-page ranking of various benches found across the Israeli landscape, from train stations to parks to schools. It was made for a graphic design class so the primary focus was on the visuals, which are very appealing, I gotta say: a tricolor setup of black, white, and green, with a generous sprinkling of images to not make the text too heavy at any given point.

The book is very clearly a first draft when it comes to the text, featuring at least two typos per paragraph, ranging from spelling “stadium” as “ztadium” to forgetting the “h” in “the”¹. Still, I think there’s something really charming about an output that’s so raw and unpolished, because it lets me see more angles of someone I’ve known for many years.

For example, it’s clear Finel thinks in english, or atleast is more comfortable expressing himself in english than in hebrew, as many sections of the book use turns-of-phrase which while awkward in hebrew, make perfect sense in english. For example, in english you might say “Wikipedia defines benches like so: [-]”, but in Hebrew the phrasing is almost always “Wikipedia defines benches as [-]”.

It’s also clear that Finel is a Gamer, as when discussing Forrest Gump & The Fault in Our Stars’s benches, he kinda skips over the movie plot if it’s not relevant to the matter at hand, and yet Hollow Knight & Split Fiction get much more description of their mechanics and lore.

At the end of the day, this book was a delight. It’s always lovely to hear someone passionate tell you all about their craft, and this book does it with wit, comedy, and a shocking amount of detail. Did you notice that the bench in Forrest Gump’s poster is different from the one in the movie? I didn’t!

I really wanna thank my friend for giving me a copy of his lil’ book about benches. It was personal, heartwarming, and after finishing it I felt like taking a walk and appreciating something I ignored before.

(Also, I’m sorry, but saying single-seater tall benches with metal that blocks your legs is a 3/5 in comfort??? You are nuts, they’d be HONORED to get a 2/5!)