Prologue


Save yourself, the plotlines and narratives and trajectories of the bestsellers crowding my night table earnestly urge in sweet, seductive whispers from their pastel-colored covers. And now, I am a typical reader: a casualty of intention and expectation, a woman shaking off a bad fall. Maybe I’m like someone you know: someone who believed she held all the answers until the day a bouquet of questions was delivered to her hospital room. And now I’m guilty of reading every one of these damn memoirs of reclaimed self-esteem, trying to figure out what just happened and what I'm supposed to do next. I’ve become a sucker for self-improvement, a postulant of positive messaging.

For someone living out her own cautionary tale, someone who started out on a pedestal of righteous good intentions and wound up crying herself sick and half-dead in a restroom off the New Jersey Turnpike, these books more than fit the bill, with their messages of salvation through cookbooks and ashrams and poems composed in serene Italian gardens. And like most parables, all of these stories come with a similar, simplistic message. Save yourself. Find yourself. Reclaim your soul from darkness and despair. Shine your light and proclaim your Truth from the hilltops, from the mountaintops, from your desktops and your laptops.

With time now to catch up on my reading, friends bring books by on a regular basis. I can’t help but notice that the covers of these stories I’ve been reading lately resemble nothing so much as board books– those chunky volumes meant to capture the attention of pre-verbal infants. By contrast, the young adult books lent to me by my young cousins and nieces are a coven of black covers adorned with gothic typefaces and distorted images of blossoms and flames and waterfalls in intense shades of orange and vermillion and ocean blue. The message of this phenomenon is that the next generation is valiantly protecting the world from supernatural forces. Women like me are merely trying to appease the demons they have created for themselves.

Like me, my favorite heroines start out in early pages weeping in places just as undignified as the Grover Cleveland Service Area – in a subway car, on the bathroom floor, just prior to the second act of Tosca, during the dessert course of an elaborate dinner party complete with wine pairings. A picaresque journey ensues, and by the time one reaches the acknowledgements and the book group guide at the end, my vicarious self has shed her dead-end job / fears about marriage / fears about motherhood / fears about Life Itself. Invariably, she has either jetted off to Asia to procure ancient wisdom, courageously cooked her own weight in artisanal butter, or bravely sets and raises her chin as she accepts the weight of a newborn or two nestled into her blessed, benevolent arms.

I, like so many other women my age, reach for one dog-eared volume or an interchangeable other in that final quiet hour of the day before sleep. We read along and imagine ourselves returning our table trays to the upright position, anticipating the descent into the foreign city that will lead us to our true selves. We picture ourselves at the stove, the wooden spoon at ease in our fingertips and the nutty aroma of browned butter and sautéed leeks filling the air as we embrace our destinies of home and hearth.

In the hour that transitions us from doing to dreaming, we try to reconcile our true potential with our deep fatigue; the equations of work and love and memory and independence relentlessly resolving and unresolving themselves with imperfect symmetry. We attune our ears to that distant melody, the song of self-salvation.

But until now, I have never been particularly interested in saving myself. I wanted to save the world.

Ever since I was a little girl, I was taught that it was my responsibility to leave the world a better place than I had found it. My mother was a schoolteacher, my father a detective. In our house, fighting injustices – of crime, of poverty, of ignorance – was as normal as pouring the first cup of coffee in the morning. It was all I ever knew. I never for even one moment imagined that going out into the world, armed only with a talent for words and intentions of doing good, would do me no good whatsoever.

Now I know differently. Like my sisters in literature, I, too, have done my time on the bathroom floor; I know the feel of white tiles cold against my cheeks. Like them, I believed the old biblical saw: those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. Something in me could never believe in a world so unjust, or a God so cruel, that those who sow in tears could actually reap a harvest that only brings forth more tears.

But I am not one of those heroines. And this is not one of those stories.

Dispatches from the Permanent Vacation

This whole being unemployed thing is just plain weird. I realize that I'm only one of millions of people who are out of work right now, as I can see for myself judging from the volume of people taking up tables at Borders right now, at 3:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. When I wrote my book here, back in the spring of 2005, I could show up at 9 in the morning and be the only person here. Now it's downright crowded. Sometimes I can't even get a table with an outlet. But I did today, which is a good thing, because even though I am not making any real second-novel progress since Sunday, I can at least waste time on Facebook and AOL and the NYS Department of Labor website.

So, hineni: here I am. Jittery, uninspired, anxious, under-exercised, pretty much broke, full of dread, and just as busy as I was when I had a job. I'm always at temple on Monday nights for meetings, on Friday nights for Shabbat services, on Saturday mornings for Torah study. On Wednesday nights, I'm in my Year 2 class for the Melton adult Jewish learning program, which, thank G-d, gave me a scholarship to continue my studies. I'm more grateful than anyone can ever know, because seriously, this is the highlight of my week at the moment. I'm trying to stay busy, call on friends, make plans. But what I'm most aware of is how quiet my life has become. Most days I go hours without talking to anyone. It's not like I have no one to talk to, but most of my communication is by email these days. When the phone rings (with apologies to anyone who has called me recently) I can't bear to pick it up. Lately I just don't have the energy to tell people the lie that I'm doing fine. I'm scared and I'm worried from the second I wake up in the morning until the sleeping pill kicks in.

(There happens to be a really cute guy one table over at Borders, which is not a bad thing. But talk to him? Yeah right. Hi, I'm a garden-variety 39 year old writer wannabe with no job. And he's probably unemployed too. Fabulous. Oh, and he just left. Probably because I exude unhappiness and stress like a subway car at rush hour.)

Most of my friends, rightfully, tell me over and over again that my last job, nice as it was, wasn't really what I need to be doing with my life. That it was just a nice little marketing job with no real potential and lots of annoyances. And they are right: it certainly did not feed my soul or fulfill my ambitions in any way. But it was a safe haven, somewhere to go, where I had a routine. Where I knew what the day would generally bring, where I could predict what a client would or wouldn't like, where I knew the guy in the deli and he knew how I took my coffee, and where I had a method to getting through the day. And sure, some days were a lot worse than others, but that's with any job. It wasn't a bad job. I've had bad jobs. I know the difference.

And now that Im trying to write about what it was like to have a bad job, I find myself lost for words, unable to get anything down on paper except a whole lot of throat clearing and basically meaningless delays. I don't seem to be able to access the emotional heart or language of the story. And I don't know why. It's not like I don't have time. It's not like I don't have access to good, cheap hazelnut latte every day between 3 and 5 (Borders coffee happy hour! Maybe that's why it's so damn crowded?) I sit down to write and, well, nothing happens.

Last time this happened to me, where I suddenly found myself without a job, I was able to both complete a book and find a new job within ten weeks. It doesn't look like that's going to happen this time. There are just so many good people out of work. And very, very little to apply for.

And of course this is complicated by the fact that I'm not sure if I really want to go back to work as a marketing director. If only there were some way to translate this writing thing into, well, writing for a living. I'm not without total hope. I mean, I do have a book coming out next summer.

But calling myself a writer, right now, feels more like a fancy way of saying that I'm a 39 year old jobless person who has had to move back home because it's just not possible to get by on $405 a week in Larchmont, NY. And without the ability to focus on a new book, I can't really call myself a writer anyway. After the past few days of nothing but beating myself up about the poor quality of the six pages I've managed to accomplish, I can totally understand why Fitzgerald and Hemingway drank. Maybe I should start.

The Last Day

When I first arrived at HRG, I was on crutches, had an IV port implanted in my upper left arm, and was recovering from a badly beaten ego. I was doing two intravenous doses a day. at 90 minutes each, of an antibiotic called Vancomycin, a.k.a. "the antibiotic of last resort." The crutches were so I could keep the weight off my left foot, from which I had just had a piece of bone removed where my doctors believed the source of my MRSA infection was alive and well and having parties in my bone marrow. The medicine was doing its damndest to try to kill the infection, or at the very least, force it to get some sleep. Lastly, the beating to my ego was inflicted by the strain of the past three months of trying to do a 90 hour a week job, please an implacable, insane and ignorant supervisor, and fight off a potentially fatal infection at the same time.

It was January of 2007. I had left my old job on the 6th and started at HRG on the 9th. At first it was just four or five hours a day, answering phones, entering data. Something, my sister told me, that would be easy, just right for me as I struggled to recover from my illness. And it was nice to have something to break up the tedium of watching that IV line leach its half-cure, half-poison into my arm.

Today is my last day at HRG, and while I'm definitely sad about it, it's also good to see how far I've come since that first day back in that sick and scary winter of '07. Since arriving here as a quasi-temp receptionist, I managed to be promoted to director of marketing communications, execute some truly fabulous branding work, build a dozen or so websites, and help a number of local and national not-for-profits do what they do even more successfully.

When I think about how damn sick I was, how long it took for me to get better, how the auto-immune souvenirs of that illness, while still sticking around, are so much better than they were, and above all, how it helped me to realize, through some great colleagues and clients, that my former boss at my old job was pretty much the only person I've ever met who didn't like me or the way I did my work. It is even more fulfilling that in the ensuing three years, she has totally gotten what she deserves. And so have I - I leave HRG with countless friends, the gratitude of my awesome clients, and a real sense of a job well done. Even better than that, I leave with faith in my potential -- that I know wherever I land, I will have a chance to do fulfilling work that is even better, at an even higher level, than the work I did here.

In the time I've spent here, it has allowed me - while still doing some great marketing work, learning new technologies, and seeing what life was like from the for-profit point of view - to take better care of myself, to lose 70 pounds, to handle health challenges, and to figure out what it is I want to do next. While working here, I learned my book would be published. I let go of a horrible person or two. I fulfilled a seven year dream of taking on a larger role at my temple. And I managed to learn that you don't have to stay in bad situations, no matter what sort of noble or faithful reasons you may have for hanging around. If the good in a bad scene is good enough, it will follow you on the path away from the negative and destructive. And if it doesn't, maybe it is really part of the bad.

So as I say so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu (to you and you and you) to my time here, to the little company that could, and to the sick and shattered person I was when I arrived, I look with faith towards a future where anything can happen. Where even, perhaps, I can make it happen for myself.

The To-Don't List for 5770

Yeah, I know: it's (once again) been a while. But it has been an eventful while. First, I should let you know that all was well that ended well with the dreaded Electric Hemorrhoid Bridesmaid's Dress (tm). Even with the two hotel washcloths stuffed into the bodice after the failure of the adhesive bra (really just a fancy name for ineffective boob-shaped scotch tape), and the fact that I had lost more weight after the final fitting and thus, had way more space in the dress than I thought I'd need, the damn thing didn't look too bad. I submit a photo for your approval here:



Coming back from the wedding (which was wonderful!), however, and coming off a weekend of alcohol-soaked bliss (I put my car away in a Philadelphia parking lot on Thursday night and didn't retrieve it until hungover on Sunday), wasn't so much fun. On my way home that afternoon, I found myself undone by said hangover and an eye infection. Not to mention a tiny incident, which I won't detail here, which sent me into a relative tailspin with regard to a relationship that I once thought was stable and happy and good - it isn't, it wasn't, and it's not likely ever to be. That was enough to put me into meltdown mode, making me in fact wonder how many hours in one lifetime do I have to spend crying in the bathroom on the New Jersey Turnpike. (The Grover Cleveland Service Area, to be specific, seems to be my service area of choice in 2009.)

Little did I know that things were about to get worse. That Wednesday, I was told that my company was eliminating three positions. Mine would be one of them.

So, there I was, finally having achieved many of the things I've been struggling with for years: I'm down 68 pounds, stopped biting my nails, wrote a pretty damn good piece about an incident in my past which has been an issue for some time. There I was, feeling like I was finally me. Like a woman who could even look decent in a pink dress made for a 22 year old. Like I was going to be all right. Like I owned it. And then: G-d laughed.

Now, perhaps I'm overdramatizing the job loss. Certainly I know a lot of people who have been laid off, had their jobs eliminated, etc. But for so long, I really thought I was safe. I thought I was going to beat this recession. But I didn't. Now, I'm a statistic. A statistic who is moving back home with Mom.

After all these years, it's a huge bummer to lose my home - and all of the privileges that go with it. Like making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at 1AM because I feel like it. Watching repeats of Family Guy before bed. Post-midnight phone conversations. And of course, the obvious freedom that comes with not living at home. I've been on my own for more than 17 years and it just feels like part of my life is over. Like I'm in mourning for my independence. To that end, my friend Todd recently asked me that if one is sitting shivah for their sex life, does that mean you cover the mirrors on your ceiling? I know none of it is forever, but it is depressing just the same.

Which leads me to where I am now - while I'm trying to focus on the positive (no rent check every month! getting unemployment! writing another book!) I just feel so angry and worthless and messed up that I don't really know what to do. Out for dinner last Thursday night, upon hearing a joke I realized that it had been so long since I had really laughed or smiled. I'm just mad all the time. Today, after a soon to be former colleague publicly treated me like crap - bascially ordering me to do admin work for her, and figuring she can because I'm no longer worth treating nicely - I heard myself wishing a slow painful death on her. Out loud. Really, this economic instability is a bad thing. I'm not quite sure whom I have become.

Given that we're less than a week out from the Jewish holidays, I think if my personal atonement is going to be worth anything, I have to be more conscious of just how horrid and unpleasant I am these days. I know I have limited patience, and limited resources, and there's a big part of me that just doesn't feel like being nice, and is tired of good things happening to rotten people. So in that vein, here are the things I am hoping I will stop doing, at least in the immediate term:


The To-Don't List

1. Stop wishing a slow and painful death on people I don't like. You know who you are. Besides, I always have books in which to kill them off.
2. Stop coveting Rock Band, the two Remastered Album collections, and all other Beatles products that are out of my budget right now: I'm only making myself miserable.
3. Stop being a bitch in committee meetings. No one wants to be there. Not just me.
4. Stop wishing in vain for a change of heart. Inertia is a cruel mistress.
5. Stop skipping my first dose of metformin. If I didn't need it, the doctor wouldn't have prescribed it.
6. Stop worrying about moving back home. Mom is cool and she loves me. Maybe I will even learn how to share space with someone. It'll be fine.
7. Stop feeling restricted by other people's expectations. Dude, I am almost 40. Old enough to know better.
8. Stop drinking Coke. Even though I'm only drinking it once a week. Metformin does NOT make it OK.
9. Stop wasting time on Facebook, Twitter, etc. I have another book to write. At least one.
10. Stop feeling so awful. Find yourself. Look outside at the sunlight. It is still a beautiful world, full of light and love and friends and chances. I am going to be OK.

Right?

A new year awaits. May we all be inscribed for a better one.

Shana tova u'metuka.

Follia

The MSN Italian to English translation says that the word Follia means 'complete irrationality.' It is also a "feminine" adjective. How perfect that I have actually reached a state of complete irrationality at this point, and all because of a bridesmaid's dress.

Not to belabor the subject, but life is bad enough when you know you're the fat maid and that none of the dresses are going to look that great on you. Let's face it. The bridal industrial complex has an image to sell. I think, when most women come face to face with that image, a fair number of them don't see themselves in it. I know I don't. But even women I know with gorgeous, nothing-to-be-ashamed-of figures fall prey to the lure of perfection. I would love nothing more than to be a perfect woman with a perfect figure for this weekend, but I've got some curves (or, calling a spade a spade, batwings and pooches) that need assistance.

In addition to having my dress literally re-made, because the three-sizes too big version was still too small in the chest, I've had to procure a number of frightening undergarments in order to, shall we say, smooth things out. I've got two different versions of the undercarriage model - one from Spanx and one from Dr. Rey's. The only real difference is that one has an additional giant panty installed in it, and I can certainly see how that would come in handy. I do not make this stuff up. I only report on it.

I have also purchased something called an adhesive bra. I will spare you the details of this monstrosity, except to say that I am unsure of its effectiveness on a hot, humid day in northwest Philadelphia. But I really hope the hotel has an engineer, or at the very least, a mechanic on call. Because it is going to be all jacked up underneath that dress.

Speaking of which...on my way to pick up the Bionic Dress yesterday, having gone through three fittings and seen the original Electric Hemorrhoid transformed into a charming taffeta and pleated chiffon deli meat casing with a ruffled hem and a back bow, I was, shall we say, detained by the Law in New Rochelle. Apparently, even when you're talking on your speakerphone, you can't pick it up to hang up the call. So, I've got my first moving violation. Ever. No points, but a blot on my eternally perfect driving record. And yes, I actually cried in front of the cop, which in addition to making me feel like a complete loser, resulted in me showing up to pick up my dress looking like a cross between a stewed beet and a hot, snotty pot of snuffling shame. This was in addition to having attended a funeral earlier in the day which was so upsetting and unjust that I can't even talk about it. Overall, not a good day.

To top things off, today I called Follia, the White Plains criminal enterprise operating as a bridal salon, to find out where the hell my shawl is since I have to leave in less than 48 hours. Follia called me back to let me know that it arrived. So I trekked down Mamaroneck Avenue, actually thinking sort of lightheartedly about getting a fruit smoothie or a sugar-free cookie at MeMe's, the awesome new bakery across the street. When I arrived, and ascended the stairway to complete irrationality, I was informed that it was going to cost me another $40 (cash only) to get my shawl, due to a so-called "rush charge" that I was never informed about.

Sorry for the bad grammar, I'm just all mad now.

Now, you know and I know that any decent business would give you a heads-up. And that they'd let you know about additional charges at, oh, say, the time of purchase. But no, with less than two days before having to leave for the wedding, this is the story I'm getting. The shawl actually comes packaged like one of those $2 pashminas you get in midtown. And she had it carefully packaged for me in a wrinkled, reused Stop and Shop bag. Yep: stay classy.

So having paid $64 for this piece of fabric, which is necessary for me not only to cover the batwings but also to preserve some small sense of personal modesty as I am not a wearer sleeveless or backless garments due to some religious reasons, it is now going to end up costing $104. For a piece of fabric. Seriously.

At this point, all thoughts of smoothies and cookies had flown out of my head. I was left feeling a hot, sick sense of rage. Rage that was massing red and purple and fuschia behind my eyes. Rage that matches the color of the dress. I had achieved, beyond all expectations, a state of Follia.

So I asked if I could come back with the cash tomorrow. I felt I would need time to gather my thoughts and words, because if I was forced to hand over the money just then, there might have been a homicide. Or at the very least, as my father used to say, a practical demonstration in police brutality.

And that's the story. I have some idea of the telling-off this bridal salon criminal is getting tomorrow. But in all seriousness, only my deep and abiding love for my friend the bride is keeping me sane. Because if I didn't love and respect and cherish my friendship with her so much, I would seriously consider jail to be a viable option this weekend. The honor of standing by her side as she continues her beautiful life journey is really what's kept me going - through the fittings, through the freakshows, through the Follia.

And so, on to Saturday evening. The big mazel. I can't wait.

Aporkalypse Now

Well: hello again, friends. I'm back from a glorious week in Long Beach Island, NJ. All I can say is: wow. Amazing beauty. Total peace. Tremendous enjoyment. You Jersey folks have been holding out on me! I've never enjoyed a vacation as much as this one. Along with my sister, her adorable boys, my mom, and two beloved cousins, I stayed in a beautiful beach house right on the Atlantic. A 35 second walk to the beach. A deck with deliciously comfortable chairs where we sat together every morning and chatted over breakfast in the ocean air, and had cocktails most nights. We even had a designated cocktail theme each evening (the cosmos were my favorite). My cousin JoAnn, a strong a courageous woman in her own right, also happens to be an amazing professional chef who cooked the most gorgeous and authentic paella I've ever eaten. Jeanine, my other cousin, kept me laughing - and more importantly - thinking, every time we talked. And best of all, I got to spend a week with two of my favorite people in the world, Connor and Ryan, who showed me that I could really enjoy the beach, and basically forced me to get on a boogie board for the first time in my life. "We know it's not fun for you," seven year old Ryan quipped while standing on the shoreline, "but it's really fun for us to watch you getting messed up by the waves."

I and my crazy awesome Italian family also managed to consume some form of pork every day, until we finally started calling our sojourn, "doing the Porkfecta." This was capped off by an insane late night conversation about Taylor ham which was presided over by my mother, who in her long ago and misspent youth was a huge fan of the stuff. I lived in Philadelphia for almost three years, never once had it. Perhaps it's because the packaging makes me think it has spent the past forty-plus years sitting in a warehouse. I mean, you just don't see design sensibilities or fonts like this anymore:


I'm not a great vacationer, not a summer or a beach person, but there was something truly magical about the week. Normally, when I go on vacation, I start counting the days until I get home. Unfortunately, I'm just not the kind of person who gets turned on by exploring the unknown or seeing new places - I mean, it's nice, I love the perspective change it imparts, but I'm a homebody at heart. I start missing my friends, my stuff, my routines. But this time, I really didn't want to leave. Maybe it's because this was the kind of vacation where I could kind of bring routine and the comforts of home with me - except that this time, those comforts revolved around reading out on the deck early in the morning, helping to defrost shrimp and cut up Jarlsberg for cocktail hour, heading out to explore the town with my mom, taking the boys for ice cream after dinner. When it was time to leave, all I wanted was to stay. More than that, I wanted to cry that this wonderful week was at an end.

One night while I was out on the deck, watching the changes in the sky as it darkened and listening to the sounds of the ocean, I started thinking about the word shalom. How it means not just peace but wholeness. This week was the first time in five years that I felt whole again, like the terrible business of illness and grief and bullies and struggle might finally be in the past. There was even a part of my heart that felt like missing my dad was okay, after all these years, because I could simply imagine him getting right into the surf on a boogie board with the kids, just as if he was there with us. And because he wasn't there, it was my job to go boarding instead. Because I am finally well enough. And because I wasn't afraid.

My comfort level in this sunshiny, beachy environment - normally hellish for me with my pale skin and my less than slender figure - may also have been helped by the fact that I found a swimsuit in which I not only felt comfortable, but downright gorgeous. I would have let anyone look at me in this suit, would have happily posed for the full figured edition of Sports Illustrated. I've rarely felt so pretty in something as revealing. As I said to my sister, you know you're feeling good about your figure when you start judging all the other overweight people in your head. Being down nearly sixty pounds does wonders for one's self-esteem, even with a ways yet to go.

Speaking of the figure wars, my latest fitting for the bridesmaids' dress took place last night. The seamstress is a genius; basically it has been transformed into the bionic garment. While the color, style and design have now conspired to make me consider posting a "wide load" sign on my rear end for the duration of the nuptials, the length, I have to say, is charming - tea-length with a little flounce at the bottom - seriously cute. Moving upwards, however, not so much. This dress is the total opposite of the swimsuit - I am going solo to this wedding because I think it is better to spare those you love. There is no male friend, hetero, gay, or otherwise, that I would force to endure the sight of me in this color. I thought getting a tan would improve matters. It has not. Now my skin looks greenish with an overtone of orange. But the fabric color itself - previously named electric hemorrhoid - has been upgraded, in honor of my family, to Taylor Ham. It is offical. I am the Haminatrix. I am the aformentioned pork roll. Glue some pistachios to it, and I'd be a freaking mortadella.

On a less self-deprecating note, I was fortunate to finish my vacation by attending the Paul McCartney show on Saturday night at CitiField. First of all, the stadium is unreal. I didn't mind Shea so much despite the concrete and the aroma of eau de beerdrinker that pervaded the place. But the new stadium is magnificent. I just hope it stays that way. Laura and I relaxed, after a full day of packing and driving and unpacking and playing with the kids, in a club-like lounge with great music and top-shelf vodka, for about an hour before the concert - it hardly felt like we were in a sports arena, waiting for the show to begin. The show itself afforded me the opportunity to sing, dance, cry, experience ecstasy in a way that I ordinarily do only in temple, and generally geek out to the music I've loved for so long. It's so strange to me how meaning in the music changes over the years. Even songs I don't love, like Helter Skelter, were cathartic in a different way at 39 than they were when I was a scared 11 year old listening to it in Ellen's upstairs bedroom and hearing about the Mansons for the first time. The concert also blew me away just by virtue of the sheer talent - hearing the person who wrote Yesterday and Hey Jude and Band on the Run and Let it Be sing them live, in the same key as they were written all those years ago. I can't even imagine having the talent to have composed some of the greatest music of all time, to be in the same environment with such a great gift. It's an experience I'll always treasure.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Until next summer.

Bridesmaid Revisited

Yeah, so I'm a 39 year old bridesmaid. So what? You wanna fight about it? Because let me tell you, I've got some stories. And not just about the dress you see in the picture. This whole bridesmaid thing started long before you ever knew me. Hell, I've got dresses older than you.

I love my friend Stephanie. She is, bar none, the most mellow and easygoing bride I've ever met (no offense to my many married friends.) I'm honored to serve as one of her bridesmaids because she's a cool girl and a great friend and dozens of other wonderful things that would take me way too long to write about. Sensitive to the various shapes and sizes of her bridesmaids, she graciously allowed us to choose our dresses - all we had to stick to was the color and the fabric.

This did not come as a surprise. In addition to being an awesome powerful woman in her own right, Stephanie is one of the few women I know who is all about confidence-building, the kind of friend who makes you feel not merely like you're a supermodel with a genius IQ and you could achieve anything, but also that you're fine just the way you are, and if you don't have the outer beauty that you'd like (and she definitely fell out of the supermodel with the genius IQ tree) then you're fine just the way you are. Obviously, she has endowed me with so much confidence that I really believed, when I picked out the dress, that I would look pretty much like the girl in the photo above.

Now, those of you who know me also know that this is not the first time I have met my nemesis in the guise of chiffon and tulle. When my sister married in 1987, she chose not only six bridesmaids who were all no taller than 5'4" and weighed no less than 120, but also a dress that can only best be described as Krystle Carrington on crack. A late-eighties model atrocity featuring a bouffant ballet skirt (in WHITE tulle) but also a plunging sweetheart neckline, a short fitted waist and puffed tulle sleeves right out of the Joan Crawford collection. To say I looked like a Green Bay Packer in drag would be a kindness. It was more like a circus production of Swan Lake in which Odette and Odile are danced by Siamese twins. The White Swan and the Black Swan getting together to produce one galumphing, graceless entity: the Fat Swan.

What added significant insult to injury was that the dress only came in a top size of 12. And in those days, I was a 14. Fully at the mercy of my mother and sister, I was dragged to aerobics three days a week, did Jane Fonda's workout on the off days, subsisted on melba toast and celery. But G-d made my rib cage a certain size, and unfortunately, that size was incompatible with the dress my sister chose. Two weeks before the wedding I ended up in a different dress, one that actually fit me and made the most of my 5'10" and, shall we say, delicious figure. The photos are actually quite lovely. (Or so my therapist has told me.)

Fast-forward to this past Sunday, twenty-two years and two weeks later, when I unwrapped the plastic, knowing that this time I'd be safe. Considering what I'd gone through back in the day, I was going to outwit everyone this time -- the diet programs, the gym memberships, the entire bridal-industrial complex. For Stephanie's wedding, I'd ordered the dress three sizes too big. Plus, I was glowing in the knowledge that I'd shed 56 pounds since last September, getting ever closer to that size 14 I used to be. I could hardly wait to see what I'd look like in the slinky scarlet gown on the hanger.

I happened to be at my mom's. So I went into my old room, wiggled out of my (new!) skinny jeans and t-shirt, put on the gown (too big in the waist and hips! yes!), and reached around back for the zip.

Huh.

I went out into the living room. "Mom," I asked, "can you zip this?"

She tried. Valiantly. And although the dress was roomy at the waist, and more than accountable at the hips, once the damn zip got halfway up my back, well, my luck just ran out. Try as one might, there was no way in hell this was getting around my chest. Judging from the issues at hand, there was a good six inches of space between where the zipper was supposed to meet.

Mom came around to survey me from the front. "You're not bringing a date to this wedding, are you?" she asked, as she futzed with the pleats covering my boobs.

"Wasn't planning to," I replied.

"Good," she said, standing back and looking at the dress from head to toe. "Because this dress really does nothing for you."

I went to my room and looked in the mirror. It was the first time I had seen myself in a gown since, well, the All Saints Day Pageant in 1976, where I had been awarded the plum role of Saint Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. I'd worn a pink gown with a baby-blue veil crowned by flowers. I was six, and I'm sure I looked quite cute and holy and sweet. This, on the other hand, was not quite the same sort of religious experience, unless you considered it in terms of a martydom. The color was gorgeous. Just not on me. I looked like something out of Leviticus. And not the good parts, where G-d comes to Sinai and the people Israel experience divine revelation. Nope, I looked like a cross between the skin disease and the placenta and the sacrificial fat of the liver parts. And worst of all, the best description of the combination of my skin tone and the color could only be described as "electric hemorrhoid."

Leave it to me to be unable to see the gorgeous porcelain complexion of a face that has changed both beautifully and radically since losing the multiple chins, the not-too-shabby cleavage, or the fact that I have become literally a nephew lighter in the past ten months, leaving me with a way more proportioned figure and actually, not looking so bad. Instead, all I could focus on was that I had about sixteen yards of pleated chiffon covering my boobs, fourteen yards of pleated chiffon emphasizing my still-not-tiny waist, and a pair of uncovered shoulders that would scare even the most seasoned personal trainer into retirement. But that wasn't the real problem. My real problem was, how the hell was I going to close the gap - literally - in the back?

So I immediately got on Facebook and asked for help. A few people responded and I ended up calling a nice lady recommended by my friend Adrienne. We made an appointment for Tuesday so I got in the car with my ninety yards of Electric Hemorrhoid and headed for the seamstress' office.

Well: she looked at me, looked at the dress, looked at the tag with the size on it, laughed and said, I don't think I can help you. However, once we discussed the fact that she would have all the material from the bottom to work with (the dress has to be hemmed to tea-length), she might be able to work a miracle.

So, again, I humbly submitted to being stripped down to my skivvies, held out my arms for the tape measure (tossed around me like a lasso, may I add) and squinted my eyes shut at the reality of my un-Barbie-esque measurements. Then I put on the dress. The woman pinned and tucked, lifted and pinned again. Really, more pins than I'd ever seen in my life. In locations where I am not really comfortable seeing dozens of pins. I looked in the mirror and realized I'd gone from Saint Elizabeth to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

At that moment, I have to say that I wondered what it would be like to be a small girl, one of those women who can flit through fittings and wear off-the-rack sample sale clothes and never has to worry about the communal dressing room at Loehmanns. I've never been the kind of person to care about that stuff, I've always had a pretty good sense of personal style that improved vastly after I started watching What Not To Wear and learned how to dress the figure I have. And the figure I had 56 pounds ago. But this just seemed, really, about as bad as it could get. A flashback to the awful days in 1987 when I thought I'd never be like those other women, that flock of beautiful swans attending my sister while I hung back in a different dress, feeling like a failure and a freak. After all the weight I'd lost, I'd just started feeling really ok about my body again, like there was more that was good and beautiful about me than horrific and shameful. And now this.

She finally finshed with me, lifted the electric hemorrhoid over my head and said she'd need some time. The upshot is that she has to take it apart, rebuild the back and the zipper, and then make the whole thing again -- the Steve Austin of bridesmaids dresses - thankfully, we have the technology. I asked if there would be enough fabric left over to make a little cape or a shawl. She laughed again, this time quite merrily, at how silly I am to think that there was going to be any leftover material. I thanked her graciously, went back out to my car, immediately called the bridal salon a few doors down from my office and ordered myself a shawl. I had all the information I needed, including the information that I was going to need something to mitigate just how awful I may end up looking in this dress. The conversation went something like this:

Yes, Jasmine Belsoie. The fabric is Tiffany Chiffon. Color? (biting lip) Yes, the color is Peony.

But I'm sure you can guess what I wanted to say.

Next fitting: July 20th.

Rainy Days and Fridays

It's raining again. Oh no, it's raining again. Not that I'm unhappy about it. I know I am sturdily in the minority in this one, but damn, I love this weather. This June is probably going to go down as the rainiest on record, but for me it's been a delicious reprieve from the typical sun and heat. As a committed summer-hater, I think back with despair and disdain on the insufferable mornings spent sweating on the platform at Larchmont, already overheated at 8:30 in the morning. Or forced jaunts out to the beach, where my skin was subjected to lobster-ification no matter how high the SPF number on the sunscreen bottle. Yeah, I'm just not a summer person. Give me a walk in the rain, with the smell of wet grass rising and fat saturated blossoms bowed with raindrops, a hike through the green-grey mist of Manor Park where the chocolate-colored waves churn darkly toward the shoreline, and the Whitestone bridge disappears like the shadow of a cat into the fog, and I'm as happy as a yak. In spite of my Italianate/Sephardi blood, in spite of my love for sun-ripened summer fruit and the heavy coconut aroma of suntan oil, I find the summer sun itself way more destructive than delicious. This is definitely where my melancholy Scottish neshama comes out to play.

So it's five o'clock, three hours from the very first lay-led Shabbat services of the season, and I'm in the office alone (everyone else is either off or done for the day) digging on this new tune from the Plain White T's (1, 2, 3, 4), listening to the thunder and considering Michael Jackson's legacy. On Facebook today, I've seen everything from crude humor (which I won't repeat) to out and out mourning for the alleged King of Pop. I don't know how I feel about it. I remember getting Thriller (my own copy, as my sister's was sacrosanct) even though I think Off the Wall is a way better album, and at the time thinking really badly of Paul McCartney for recording Say Say Say and that eternal affront to the Beatles' legacy, The Girl is Mine. Love Me Do was one thing, but he should have known better. (Oooh, did I just make a pun?) I can see where the Jackson 5 made some damn good pop, but MJ's later behavior - especially silencing alleged molestation victims with huge amounts of cash - does put that legacy into a different league.

There is also something just so undignified about a WORLDWIDE, all caps, front page slide presentation, the failure to realize that this is life and death, kids, and instead let's quote the lawyers and doctors and police officers, all jockeying for the sound bites amidst this insanely personal outpouring of grief for a person that no one knew in person, like when Princess Diana died and everyone went a little batshit. When John Lennon was murdered, when George Harrison died two months after the towers fell, I understood it, maybe because I love the Beatles so intensely and I took their deaths to heart in a way that I'm not doing today. I was ten when Lennon died, and I remember feeling like a zombie, absolutely shocked and horrified at what occurred that December night. But there was something so fragile and vulnerable and yet bold and invincible as the silence of the vigil that was held for him in Central Park that Sunday. Twenty nine years later I'm not sure we know how to grieve as a human community anymore, thanks to the twenty four hour news cycle and the intense need for attention and spotlight so many people seem to have. Which is ironic, as Jackson's music at its peak really did touch so many people, much as the Beatles did at theirs. But I remember the communal aspect of mourning for Lennon, and that is what struck me as being the most absent factor in the mourning for Michael Jackson. Hard to say how each man's individual legacy (or manner of death) accounts for that difference.

So, back to the rain. There's some pretty nasty thunder going on right now, which I can hear even in my windowless office. Even with the celebrity madness this week it's been a good one; on Monday we held the last of my company's events for the spring, at which I got to hang out with one of my best friends. On Thursday I had the chance to reconnect with an old friend from grad school, and talk literary theory (which I hadn't had the opportunity to do in years). This morning I woke up with the first RA flare I've had in months, but even that seems to be a bit milder than usual - and I'm knocking wood that it doesn't worsen. I even made a Rain Songs mix CD to celebrate this amazing weather, which my mom says makes me even weirder than she suspected. I can't help it. First, there are just so many good rain songs (Here Comes the Rain Again, Kentucky Rain, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, The Rain King - the list goes on). And second, it's an abundance, a gift from the heavens (to be fair, I don't call the tsunami or Katrina a gift - just to clarify). But this rain is wonderful, refreshing and delicious and we'd be whining if we were in a drought. So what if we had a couple of extra weeks of mashiv ha-ruach u'morid hagashem - and maybe a little more morid hatal than we felt like getting. I, for one, am carrying an umbrella, and counting my blessings.

Sinai at Sea

In honor of my favorite holiday, Shavuot, which begins at sundown tonight, I offer a link this lovely column that I wrote about celebrating the holiday on vacation with my Mom back in 2006.

The irony of this year's celebration is that as much as I adore this holiday, because of its relationship to conversion - reading from the Book of Ruth in particular - is that this is the first year I just don't feel like a convert anymore. That being said, a dear friend of mine who is in the process reached out to me this morning to ask me questions about what she is about to experience. I'm more grateful for her questions than I can say, because they were a timely - and timeless - reminder of what it means to stand at that holy mountain and receive wisdom and wonder.

Chag shavuot sameach!

http://www.interfaithfamily.com/holidays/shabbat_and_other_holidays/Sinai_At_Sea.shtml

O Captain, my Captain

Any time I emailed Frank, my salutation was those timeless words from Uncle Walt: O Captain, my Captain. I found out later that this was what many of Frank's students called him, perhaps using the honorific from Dead Poet's Society, or acknowledging Frank's pitch-perfect Jean-Luc Picard impersonation. But I would like to think that I was the first to address him thusly, even though I'm sure I wasn't.

Since grad school, the two years we spent in the creative writing graduate program at Temple University (known to this day as Temple Writers), we were buddies. Even though I was in the Poetry department and he was in Fiction, something drew us to one another from the first day. We didn't even have that many classes together, but he was pretty much my strongest influence, my greatest supporter. I think that we bonded over the fact that unlike so many of our colleagues, neither of us really cared about what we called "the trappings" or "the uniform." Frank was a solid, splendid writer who cared about language and its relationship to the world of science and reason, thought and image. Like me, he wasn't interested in wearing dreadlocks or dressing in Doc Martens or flea-bitten bohemian outfits from the thrift shop on South Street. He was about substance, not costume. Quality, not farce or fashion.

When things started breaking down for me as a poetry student - when my professors, in their so-called wisdom, started praising such eternal works as my colleague Elena's poem (which consisted of the word "icicles" written nine times), and when my faculty advisor informed me that I'd never be taken seriously as a writer unless I changed my name ("Andi is nothing more than a perky little sorority girl nickname."), Frank urged me to get out. I can remember the conversation as if it happened last week. "There is only one choice," he said in a mock-Russian accent. "Please: to defect. We in fiction offer you asylum in our country."

And that's exactly what happened. Frank convinced me to get away from the poets ("All of your poems have characters - you do realize that, right?") and I went gladly to inhabit his country, leaving behind icicles and all manner of nonsense. But Frank was more than a mere comrade. He convinced me that I could not only catch up to the other fiction writers, but that my talent would be enough to raise the bar for the entire class.

Because of his confidence in me, I managed to achieve in the space of one year what everyone else had two years to accomplish. He was the peer advisor on my thesis and offered critiques that outshone those of every other student. He was the friend who, upon hearing my work overwhelmingly praised by the Fiction faculty, drily whispered the question in my ear: "So, which one of them are you sleeping with?" He kept my ego in check while simultaneously giving me the confidence to do better, be better, write better. Above all, he conferred upon me a special nickname, derived from Fletch, one of his favorite movies. To Frank, I was always and forever Dr. Rosenpenis - which he upgraded to Rabbi Rosenpenis after I converted to Judaism. Of all the nicknames I've been called in my life, that one, perhaps, was the best. Because once Frank gave you a nickname, you knew you belonged to a very special circle.

Yesterday, I found out that he died about three weeks ago. From all accounts, he had been going through some health problems, and his heart simply gave out. His sister, on Facebook, wrote that his heart was enlarged. Of course it was. Frank was a big-hearted, opinionated, soulful, talented person. I loved how he was never willing to compete in a class that was sorely competitive. I loved that he could be a total prick to what he quietly termed "people posing as writers," but those he loved, he loved deeply and was loyal to beyond words, time, distance, and geography. I loved that, like me, he was always homesick in Philadelphia for his family and the suburb where he grew up. I loved that he hated organized religion in general but didn't think I was crazy for embracing religion in my own life. I loved that he demanded respect for both science AND fiction - he knew that the right words and a fertile imagination and a demand for high standards could combine to create a work that could transcend genres. And I loved that he was just out and out funny and smart and kind and possessed a very sensitive and gentle soul beneath all the snark and bluster.

The last time I saw Frank, I was in Chicago traveling on business. The fates had also conspired to set me up on a blind date on the Saturday night I was there. It was not a good night. I didn't hit it off with the date, and a combination of stress, despair and boredom caused me to drink more than I ever have in my life. When Frank came to get me at the hotel on Sunday morning, to take me out to lunch and then to the airport, he accepted the situation (I was throwing up, disoriented, headachy and light-sensitive, unable to even carry my own luggage) with total equanimity. "That's my Andi," he simply said, taking the suitcase out of my hands and making me sit in the lobby sipping a glass of ice water while he went to get the car. After I was able to recover a little with a bowl of pho bo at a local Vietnamese noodle shop, he drove me back to O'Hare with A Hard Day's Night in the tape player. As we harmonized on the song "If I Fell," he simultaneously corrected the song's bad grammar. "And I," he sang, "would be sad if our new love WERE in vain."

I've sung it that way ever since.

Life never took me back to Chicago. But I was always confident that he was there, in the flip side of an email, in the songs we both loved, in the writing philosophy we both shared. And every couple of years, a package would arrive in the mail from Frank - a travel guide to Chicago. There would always be a bright yellow Post It note inside, on which he had written a simple message: "Rosenpenis - come visit. Love, FAL." Every year the new guide would join the others on the shelf. I wish I had made it back out there.

I went back and read Walt Whitman this morning as I was trying to get ready to smile and look pretty for a press conference. It was not an easy read.

"O Captain, my Captain,
"Rise up and hear the bells!
Rise up--for you the flag is flung -- for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths-- for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck
- You've fallen cold and dead."

Hard to believe that this is how the poem ends.

To say that I will miss Frank is a marvelous understatement. To say that I owe him my identity as a writer of fiction is an irrefutable fact. But that's not as important as saying that I will miss my friend. I have missed him all these many years, and will miss him until I have no years left.

The Only Starfish, Part Deux: Revenge of the Starfish

My therapist fixed me with her dark-eyed gaze. "So why," she asked, "do you think, at this moment, he's come back into your life?"

Great question. And even as one, whom the Irish say, has "words at will," I was speechless. Part of my brain fired off this suggestion: "Because now you can tell the false from the true." Another cluster of cells had the following: "To check to see how much time you're going to let yourself lose. He's taken years away from you in the past. Maybe now, it'll just be a couple of days."

But my therapist, Wendy, had a point. Why him? And why now?

My ex, my tortured, liminal, hateful, loving, vengeful, tender ex, decided to give me a call - one in a series that have continued for eleven years - right on the cusp of my birthday. But the outreach started a week before. A flurry of emails. References to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Beatles lyrics. Phone messages. I was on the road, had other things on my mind. Couldn't wait to get home.

I let him know via email that if he wanted to talk to me it would have to wait a few days. He asked for my cell number. I didn't surrender. I told him that the call would have to come before 10PM, not in his usual 1 - 2 AM pattern. He followed the rules. We talked for two hours. Hearing his voice brought up the usual. Anger that he broke up with me (for not being Jewish by birth). Anger that he blew me off when my dad died (fear of mortality). Anger that he could so cavalierly say things like, "You know I'm still in love with you" and not mean them. And anger at myself for even listening, for taking the call, for letting him break the silence that I knew he would retreat into once again, just as soon as he knew he had me believing that his apologies were real, his feelings were true, and his intentions were good.

But of course they weren't. Not 12 hours after asking to see me, asking to celebrate my birthday, asking all about the book - the usual. He backed out, made up some stupid excuse, had no inclination to reschedule.

Now, OK, fine - I know I'm not dealing with a healthy person here. But on this round, I think what I realized is that I'm not dealing with a friend. At least, after eleven years, countless days of hurting, endless nights of wondering exactly what it was I did wrong, why he didn't love me and preferred to seriously mess with my head and heart instead, I was able to come to one conclusion: this isn't what love is supposed to be like. This isn't a person who understands love. No matter how gorgeous his taste in literature or amazing his taste in music. This person is just cruel. And not worth my time.

So the question remains: why him? Why now?

And the answer is: because I am smart enough to know better.

As the song goes: Now I know you're not the only starfish in the sea. If I never hear your name again, it's all the same to me.

Immediate Notification of the Book Deal

I must admit that when the contract arrived in my inbox, I was in a very undignified place, involving multi-tasking in the bathroom and simultaneously powering up my Blackberry. (No, not that! Get your mind out of the gutter!) Let me tell you, yesterday I found out that it is not easy to utter a Shehechiyanu blessing with a toothbrush in your mouth.

It didn't go down the way I expected. I always thought the news would come by phone, that it would happen at work, that it would involve screaming and shrieking and being embraced by my colleagues and that I'd be on the phone all day telling the people who mean the most to me. But instead it was just a quiet spring morning, alone in my apartment, getting ready to leave for Passover services, way too early to call anyone.

Thus, I am pleased to announce that my novel, The Bookseller's Sonnets, the book that was sown in tears and now will hopefully be redeemed in joy, will be published by O-Books (a small house in Britain specializing in religion and spirituality titles) in June of 2010.

I had a provisional contract on Tuesday, but didn't want to say anything to anyone until I was sure. This is, you should know, all due to the help and guidance of my dear friend Sally, whose beautiful memoir, The New Jew, is now available on Amazon.com. Seriously, it's gorgeous. Buy her book. Buy it now. Do not wait.

But she is not alone in making this moment possible. Throughout the past two days, my mind and heart have been full of gratitude for the friends, family, teachers, colleagues, and writers who helped me along the way. Publication of an actual novel has been a dream of mine since I was 17 years old. It's so hard to believe that this day has arrived.

Is it an accident that this happened on the first day of Passover, the festival of liberation? Not that I'm expecting to be liberated from anything anytime soon - most authors I know have to keep their day jobs. But perhaps it is instead a liberation from the past, from the heartbreak that engineered the writing in the first place. Maybe it's a liberation from that dark time, when I thought nothing would ever be right again, that I'd be grieving forever.

My dear friend Abby told me just a few short weeks ago that those we lose in the springtime contribute in some way to our own spring awakening. And yesterday I listened to a beautiful reading about Passover, which contained the idea that a seed must break to give forth life, and just as it is hard for a seed, contained in its shell, to imagine itself as a blossom, so it is with hearts full of grief, in their brokenness, to imagine that someday they will be whole.

So my hope is that this will be the beginning of the beginning - that having given my whole broken heart to this book, that perhaps with it going out into the world, somehow my broken heart will be made whole again.

In the meantime, let the celebration begin!

When the Levee Breaks

I've never been much of a Led Zeppelin fan. In fact, every morning, when my favorite classic rock station does a segment called "Get the Led Out" at 8AM, I cringe a little. Not that it's bad music, but wouldn't that regular feature be better served by something a little less, well, anti-morning? My vote would be for the Beatles, of course, but even the Stones or the Who both have enough diversity of mood in their tunes that every damn morning wouldn't feel like a funeral waiting to happen.

Zep seems somewhat of a dark way to start your day. I guess the coveted advertiser demographic of males 35-44 prefers to get dressed to "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" or "Your Time is Gonna Come" rather than something a little more optimistic, like "Good Day Sunshine" or "All You Need is Love."

That being said, the other morning I heard a Zep tune that stopped me in my tracks. I literally had to sit and listen. Because "When the Levee Breaks" both sounded and felt like the way this month has been going: like everything's been systematically crashing to the ground, destabilized by a force of nature that no one and nothing can control.

The message of the song: shit happens. Nothing you can do about it, except bitch (sit on the levee and moan), and then decide if you're going to tough it out, or up and leave for Chicago.

I do have a Chicago story that relates somewhat to this. It was what I would refer to as my "Lost Weekend" more than 15 years ago, ranking up there among the freaking stupidest things I've ever done. Having broken up with not one, but two guys back in New York, I flew halfway across the country for a blind date, set up by a friend of mine in California. Got to Chicago, ended up seriously not hitting it off with the guy, and out of a sense of total and complete despair and loneliness, got more wasted than I have ever been in my life. I can tell you straight up that my only memories of that fair city are 1) falling out of a cab 2) waking up on the couch in the lobby of the hotel I stayed in, whose name I can't remember and 3) a queasy, hungover brunch the next morning with my dear friend Frank from grad school, after which we harmonized on Beatles tunes in his car, all the way back to the airport.

After that performance, I don't think I'm welcome in Chicago. But I get it - I know what happened that weekend. The combination of hopelessness, disappointment and jetlag simply got to me. I'd had enough. The levee broke.

But anyway, back to the song. I couldn't help but think that these past few weeks have felt like a levee breaking, an overwhelming, devastating flood of sadness and destruction taking everything in its path. I've witnessed the dissolution of relationships, ravaging illnesses, financial ruin. Worst of all, my community has buried two of its children in the past three weeks.

So I could really understand that one lyric: all last night, I sat on the levee and moaned. It was so easy to picture, standing at the precipice of water and land, screaming your outrage at an indifferent sky, knowing that the structure beneath you is at its breaking point, that in the morning it may in fact no longer exist. I hate that so many people I care about have gone to sleep in peace and have awakened to total destruction. It is so hard to find blessing in any of this.

And yet, even as I sit here typing, the young, earnest voices sing out from my computer speakers: Hang on to your hopes, my friend - that's an easy thing to say, but if your hopes should pass away, simply pretend that you can build them again. Or the song that's on my iTunes right now - this whole damn world can fall apart, you'll be okay, follow your heart.

I don't know whether letting oneself wallow in the songs that mirror your mood is the right thing to do - if I should give in to getting the Led out. Is hearing the message, "Going down, going down now, going down" what you should be listening to when you're trying to lift yourself back up? Or is it OK to acknowledge that downward direction for a while, knowing you're not alone, knowing that yours is not the only brokenness?

I guess every "mean old levee" teaches us how to weep and moan. Essential life lessons, but at some point, it has to break. It has to end. And G-d willing, soon.

her equinoctial tears

The above phrase is taken from one of my favorite poems, Sestina, by Elizabeth Bishop. One of the reasons I love it is because it describes a scene of some unnameable sadness - one that is continually present but goes unmentioned among the everyday tasks that make up our days.

Anyway, that's how I'm feeling at the moment. Today is my dad's yahrzeit - it's already four years, which is sort of unreal. There's not a lot I can say about the emptiness that I haven't said before. I just can't believe that it's been four years and three days since I last spoke to him. The last conversation was when he called me to tell me to be careful coming home from work in the snow. I wish I hadn't made it home. I wish I'd never had to go through the next three days and four years.

When does this get easier?

As an added bonus, the equinoctial tears that I'm holding back today represent the exactly six month distance between today and September 11.

Given the pain of today, given the knowing that a very similar, scary emotional context awaits exactly six months from now, cycling on and on and circling back for all of the years going forwrd, I'm fascinated by this sort of calendrical balance and the balancing act I've undertaken to try to get through them.

These two dark, still incomprehensible days stand as perfectly poised and equidistant as dancers who mirror one another's movements but never touch. And between them there is the same chasm of time, endlessly full of that same unnameable sadness.

Really, nothing else to say today. It's just been a sad, sick, horrible week, full of tragedies that I don't even have the words to talk about. I know those things should give me some perspective on today, but unfortunately the flawed and sad human being I am is winning out over the spiritually evolved one I hope to be someday.

I had originally intended to end this with some sort of blessing, but honestly, I just don't have the stomach for it.

Philadelphia

Sometimes I just need to run away. For the past couple of years, however, the options were limited, since - let's face it - running wasn't realistic. Neither was walking, for that matter. But having hit some sort of watershed - whether it's the loss of 50 lbs, or the fact that the damn methotrexate is actually doing its job - I have the energy now, if not to actually run, then to just get away for a bit.

Too much is going on here. Another friend got laid off this morning. Too busy at work, grateful for my job but nervous about my issues with time management. I'm not writing, and not really exercising, which means my nerves are kind of shot. I've got some friends and family members in very stressful situations; facing divorce, caring for sick parents, looking for jobs, wondering if they're going to have jobs tomorrow...all those things, ironically, leave me wondering why I'm the lucky one right now. Is it because there's an unbeknownst shoe about to drop? Or have I already been through my craziness?

So I ran away this weekend. To Philadelphia, where I used to live. Where I had my first apartment, a huge, light-filled 2 room studio on Pine Street, with a big homey kitchen and a fabulous great room where I slept for 2 years on a pull-out couch. There was a lot going on then too - full time grad school, writing a book, exploring religious life, full time job, and two major transitional relationships...I was dating a real jerk who was never going to be the one and simultaneously hanging out with my so-called "best friend" - with whom the chemistry was painfully evident, a relationship so full of love and longing and questions that it nearly drove us both insane, which was, of course, half the fun.

It amazes me that I probably had even more going on in my life then than I do now - certainly some of the same elements are there. But now it feels like things are different. I'm sure part of it is the illness piece - looking back then I had no idea what I was in for now. I look at the cobbled streets and brick-lined sidewalks and remember the girl I was, the one with two parents, the one who walked with a quicker stride than anyone else, whose bag wasn't filled with seven different kinds of medicine for various nonsense. Back then, I had never taken a painkiller, never worried about getting through the day. My big worries were about the viability of source texts of female religious mystics, the suitability of certain Berenstain Bears titles for "story time" at Borders, and whether or not my best friend was going to let his unhappy, ill-timed, passive aggressive relationship go so that we could be together. (Answer? Religious mystics were not on the comps; the book "Berenstain Bears and the School Bully" ends with a trip to the school psychologist's office, and yes - he woke up - and yes, we were very happy for a while. but that's another post.)

In the meantime, I went back for the weekend. And I walked the streets of my old neighborhood again. I looked for that girl walking back to her apartment, looked for her coming from the direction of the Chef's Market, or from Rittenhouse Square, or the parking garage on Spruce Street. But I didn't see her. I wonder what I would have said to her if we'd run into each other. Would I have put a hand out to touch her arm, sat her down on a bench and tell her what was coming? Or would I have seen that million-dollar smile, the honey-colored bangs swept back from her forehead, the gleam of a novel-to-be in her hazel eyes, and just let her keep on walking?

Be My Valentine...or, maybe not?

So it's three days past Valentine's Day, which makes me happy only insofar as we are pretty much as far from next year's Valentine's Day as we can get. For many people, Valentine's Day is an expression of affection, of love and loyalty and romance. For others, it's a pressure cooker of expectations and fears and failures. And for people like me, it ranks somewhere on my personal hate scale in the neighborhood of bias crimes, stomach flu, and anything composed by Zoltan Kodaly. This is the holiday that comes in at number two on my list of Top Ten Most Hated Holidays, knocked out of the top spot only by my deep and abiding hate for New Year's Eve. But that's another post.

Valentine's Day rarely goes well for me. I had a decent one in 1988, when I received a white carnation from a dear friend of mine, which I carried with me the entire weekend as I was sitting for a scholarship exam at the college I would eventually attend. I got the scholarship, too. And I always believed it was because the carnation brought me good luck.

Since then, it's been pretty much downhill. It may be as a result of the fact that two of my most notorious breakups occurred either on, or as a result, of Valentine's Day deeds gone bad. It may also be that as a young admin assistant back in the 90s, I was heartily sickened by the fluttery coven of pink-suited sales managers whose roses I had to schlep from the front of the office to their desks. "For me?" they'd ask sweetly, as the whole damn sales group would flit and coo over to survey the new bouquet. And based on the floral content / presumed expense / sincerity of sentiment read aloud (with all the deep and dramatic sincerity of a wannabe starlet at an open call audition) from the enclosed card, you could practically see the Olympic-style judging going on in their faces.

I distinctly remember receiving a bouquet of my own one year - twelve long-stemmed yellow roses, my favorite flower. "Oh, but yellow roses only mean friendship," one of the coven declared dismissively. "I guess he doesn't really feel that way." It figured: if your gift, no matter how meaningful, didn't fit into their judging standard of red roses, chocolates, teddy bears and other consumerist cliches, it could only mean one thing -- to quote yet another consumerist cliche: He's just not that into you.

Then there was the year I was in grad school. I was really poor, in spite of my $425 a month studio apartment in Society Hill. So for the month of January, I scrimped and saved, eating lentil soup and ramen noodles as I prepped for my comprehensives, all so I could make a really expensive and exquisite dinner for my boyfriend. Things, at the time, weren't going so well with us. He wasn't really the nicest person in the world to begin with -- we'd struggled for all of our college years with issues of fidelity (him), the subsequent depression (me), substance abuse (him), and pressure to marry (me, both sets of parents). And I'd literally had my head in a book for the past three months, and when I wasn't reading I was working on my thesis, working on papers for my literary critcism and theory courses, or working at my job as the Borders Story Lady. So I planned a dinner, hoping to rekindle the warmth along with promises of significant romantic attention from me, just as soon as my comprehensive exams were done.

I remember the menu as if it were yesterday: lobster risotto (yeah, I know - it was, after all, B.C. - before converting), steak, stuffed peppers, with chocolate truffles for dessert. All homemade. He arrived late, stayed long enough to eat dinner, and as he was walking out the door to meet up at a South Street bar with his buddies, he paid me an unexpected compliment: "It was good," he said, as he wiped the chocolate from his mouth and put on his coat. "But you cut the peppers the wrong way."

I broke up with him shortly thereafter. I also thought a restraining order would have been a nice touch, but I didn't have the money for a lawyer at the time.

Then there was the Valentine Havdalah Disaster of 2005: It started fairly harmlessly, when my alleged fiance-to-be asked me what I wanted as a Valentine's gift. I picked out a havdalah set from Israel. I figured, hey, it was different, and it wasn't that expensive. But, again, things weren't all that great between us. We'd been fighting a lot; he hated his job, I adored mine; I had just gotten a big raise, he was struggling financially...it was one of those times. Which, incidentally, gives me great empathy for any person who is coping with a partner who thinks that they are worthless right now because they are jobless or under-earning or just plain defeated by the current economic crisis...it's not good, and it can kill a relationship stone dead. Just like it did in my case.

Here's how it happened: Valentine's Day arrived, with no sign of my havdalah set. Two weeks later, it still hadn't arrived. I asked my F-T-B what was up. And so the conversation went something like this:

Me: So, did you ever check on the shipping for the Havdalah set? It still hasn't gotten here.

FTB: Well, um, yeah. I know.

Me: So you checked on it?

FTB: No, I never actually got around to ordering it.

Me: What? You told me you ordered it two weeks ago.

FTB: Well, do you remember back in November, when I woke you up because I really needed to talk to you about my job situation?

Me: I think so? Was it when you woke me up at four in the morning, on the day I was moving to the new apartment?

FTB: Yeah, that's it.

Me: And we had just gone to bed at 2AM because I was packing? Which would have taken a much shorter time if you'd have helped me?

FTB: (sheepishly) uh huh.

Me: And we had to be up at 6AM for the movers? So I asked if we could talk later?

FTB: (raising voice) No, not exactly. You yelled at me.

Me: Well, that's not surprising.

FTB: You yelled at me! Your exact words were, "Are you still going to hate your job at 9AM? Because maybe you can continue your f*cking whining then."

Me: Yeah, that sounds about right I mean, you'd been talking about it for hours. And we really needed to get some sleep.

FTB: Well, be that as it may, I don't think you were being a very good girlfriend. So I decided not to get you a Valentine's Day present.

(pause)

Me: I see. I think we should maybe take a break.

*******************************************

And that was it. I broke up with the tool two weeks later. Which, I think, showed admirable restraint on my part. It would have been sooner, but unfortunately, I had other things to deal with, like my dad dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in the interim. It did, however, give me the opportunity to say, when FTB came crawling back, asking me to give him another chance: "Actually, my dad HATED you."

So, no, I'm not really a fan of Valentine's Day. I'd like to feel differently about it, but I don't think I ever will. Some of you might think it is just Single Girl Bitterness(tm) on my part, but I don't think it is that simple. I've been on all the sides of the equation, in love, out of love, feeling like I should be in love when I'm not, wishing I were in love but not really ready to open my heart, knowing that I probably do love someone but that I'm sort of useless as a partner right now, I have only this to say: I don't think I would want to be with anyone who would comply with a once-a-year tribute on a day when everyone else is saying the same exact thing. If I ever am lucky enough to be beloved of someone wonderful, and I feel the same way about him, then I really hope and pray that we will be best friends and lovers and everything imaginable to one another every day, and that I will know how to distinguish my own emotions and expectations from what the Valentine-industrial complex is telling me I ought to be feeling.

So this year I did the things I love most: I wrote for a couple of hours. I studied some Torah. I went for a walk in Manor Park and petted every friendly dog I ran into. I bought myself some ridiculously expensive French cheese and watched Law and Order. And breathed a huge sigh of relief that I didn't have anyone expecting the peppers to be cut a certain way, or for me to wake up in the middle of the night to listen to the same damn complaining about a situation he was doing nothing to improve. This year, I could just be me, with no one's expectations but my own. And isn't that a sort of celebration?

Birthday (I would like you to dance)

Today is the 39th - good Lord - 39th birthday of my best friend, Ellen. Which is crap, when you come to think of it, because Ellen and I met when we were 8 years old, and when I hang out with her, sometimes it seems like we are still 8 years old, and her little sister Michelle is still little, and we have our whole lives in front
of us, and there is still a chance for the Beatles to get back together.

Last time I saw Ellen was this past summer, when, as usual, she was the cool, trippy, funky, awesome, scholarly, adorable, geeky, loving person she has always been, except now she is an amazing partner to her husband Jay (another of the coolest people I've met, ever) and mom to Cory and Samantha, born some years apart but each one a unique and thoughtful and beautiful soul in their own right. One of the things I love most about my friend is that she is the least intimidating person I've ever known. She knows how to guide, and love, and reach out to people in a way that doesn't piss them off, or drive them away, or make them feel stupid. She just is. And as always, I'm scrabbling to keep up with her evolved soul, always getting trapped in the algae and deadwood of my own limits.

When we were kids, we had the good fortune - but not so good for Ellen - of having a lot of freedom. Certainly more than I ever had at home, that is. Because we were always hanging around at her house, and because her mom was rarely around, we ended up teaching ourselves about a lot of things. Like grief, when her beloved Sinjin died, but happy things too, like not really knowing how much you could actually laugh until you tried it (e.g., the Band Room, the A-School, the Young Ones) or how music could literally change the nature of your being, and the more you engaged with it, the more transformative power it possessed.

Because of Ellen, I had a magical - in the true sense of the world - childhood and adolescence. Our friendship has survived all these years because it is built on a foundation of memory and understanding and laughter and connection. And I know, that like her, when I get married someday, I'll marry a person who reminds me of that connection.

Recently I was at a party with other friends from high school and a number of them talked about how much they envied us, how they wished they'd had a friend like that, a relationship that survived against all odds and someone whom they knew always had their back, no matter what. It made me remember a day in the A-school, right before Ellen moved to North Carolina, where we cut in half the cardboard artwork we called "Sleepover." As we cut it, people around us cried, but we didn't. I think we'd always realized that it was just a symbol of what we were carrying inside. No matter what was to come - and the list includes a lot of unbelieveable items - losing parents, breakdowns, running away from home, crises of the heart, fire, flood, and finally ending up across the country from one another - we'd always be carrying that other half with us.

In Jewish tradition, the number 40 is binah - the word for wisdom. And since we are almost there, with thanks for the wisdom you've shared with me, and in hopes of someday being as amazing and evolved and full of peace as you are, I can only say in the words of our favorite band: I'm glad it's your birthday; happy birthday to you!

Week in Review

It's Friday, and with half an hour to go (6:30) before I get out of here and head for services, all I can say is that Shabbat can't get here fast enough. Technically, I suppose, it's here, as the sun has been down for a couple of hours, but if any kind of sweet relief was supposed to arrive with nightfall, it's not here yet.

What a week. Aside from the rent check debacle, it seems that my AMEX payment was also lost in the mail (took care of that this morning). Additionally: this week I was accused, and thankfully cleared (yay for my good record keeping, for once), of wrongdoing in an article I wrote recently for a print publication; the amazing and miraculous events surrounding yesterday's emergency landing in the Hudson, while truly inspiring and wonderful have nonetheless triggered the 9/11 nightmare code in my brain; and my toilet, in spite of two repairs this week, is still not functioning.

So I don't really know how much Shabbat is going to be able to do for me. I have more faith in xanax, but I have to drive. And yet I am not sure I should be medicating these problems. Granted, there's not much I can do about lost checks, downed planes, or malfunctioning plumbing. But it does seem symptomatic of feeling like things are spinning - make that raging - out of control - and that the Universe has handed me a somewhat justified ass-kicking for not paying attention. Is xanax just a better way of hiding from the problems I'm already not coping with? And yet I am pretty wound up and I would love an escape, even for a couple of hours, from the fallout and the post-traumatic stress. I'm tired. I'm sorry things got so bad, I'm sorry I wasn't paying attention to the lost checks and my bank balance and all that, but plenty of people are just as stupid as I am. Why is it that I feel like I'm really, really being punished?

But am I? Everything worked out, didn't it? I'm not homeless, or sued, or dead, or even cleaning the unspeakable off my bathroom floor. I'm just left with a pile of notes that I'm glad I kept, a pile of mail that I have to go through, and a pile of old traumas that are going to stick around whether I like it or not. And of course, having to lift the cover off the tank and do the manual lift-chain mambo isn't all that bad. It's just annoying.

Hopefully some good music, some good words from Shemot, this week's Torah portion, some good friends, and some good sleep will help me to put this into perspective. If anyone has any low-cost, effective ideas for how to unwind after a week of really bad stress, by all means please share: now's the time.

Rent

Today I found out what happens when your rent checks get lost in the mail. That's right. Checks, in the plural.

On Monday night I came home from a lovely happy dinner with my dear friend Hayley to find a big obnoxious notice masking-taped to my door. An eviction notice. Basically, it gave me 72 hours to prepare for a sheriff's arrival at my door (Do we have a sheriff in Larchmont? Insert your Blazing Saddles joke here) to lock me out, get rid of my stuff at auction, etc. Every bad thing you could possibly think of. Worst of all, I had no idea why this was happening to me.

You'd think that a broken toilet is bad enough. That's what I came home to on Friday night, after another lovely dinner with a dear friend. In both cases, on Friday and Monday, I'd had this wonderful time, gotten to catch up with two very dear people, and came home much lighter of heart. On Friday night, I arrived home to an inability to flush. By Monday night, it felt like my life was going down the toilet.

Two days of phone calls (unreturned) to the management office revealed nothing. No one called back, and so I assumed everything was OK, that it had been a mistake, that they had the wrong guy, whatever. This morning, however, my angel of a super called to let me know that something was indeed very wrong. He let me know whom I had to call at the central office (and gave me a direct line), but had no idea what was happening. And being the nice person he is, was quite upset at the notion of having to let someone lock up my place and take all my stuff.

So I called. And the woman was totally responsive once I had her direct line: but -- imagine finding out that not one, but TWO of your rent checks have gone missing. Suddenly, the notice from the sheriff seemed appropriate.

I know what you're saying. Believe me, I can hear you yelling from my office, which doesn't even have any windows. I'm an idiot. Don't I check my bank statements? Didn't I notice more funds in my checking account? The answer, dear friends, is no. Because I am not really good at keeping track of stuff like that. They say that creatives are hopelessly impractical, and yes, even THIS hopelessly impractical. I was at a funeral recently where during the eulogy someone said that the deceased - a highly successful, functional, creative individual - was unusually bad at things like opening mail, checking bank statements, and keeping files current. I know it might sound bizarre, but I felt entirely relieved that I wasn't alone in my organizational disability.

Unfortunately, I never thought it would come to this. I figured that my rent was paid because, well, I didn't have any reason to think it wasn't. I mean, no one called, no one emailed...but I'm assuming perhaps that they might have sent a notice in the mail, which is, in all likelihood, sitting in a pile with my unopened bank statements.

But I never for one minute imagined that the management office was missing, counting January, three months worth of payments. So the very nice person at the management office - and believe me, the niceness meant a LOT to me today - having realized that this was an honest mistake (or being struck by the panic in my voice) - said I could get a bank check for everything including January's rent (which they haven't gotten either - oy) and a crapload of late fees, costs, etc., and if I could pay it by 5:00, they'd call off the dogs, and the sheriff, and the auctioneer, and presumably the executioner, the jester, the clam goader and the angry crowd of taunting peasants hurling rotten vegetables imported from some medieval street market five hundred years ago.

My mother, the single, rational, calm voice of reason over the course of the past three days, could not have been more supportive or smart. When I told her what happened - that I needed an emergency bank check - she helped me pull it together, did a transfer, and made sure everything was covered.

So I got my coat on, hustled right the hell out of my office, got my bank check, boogied it over to the office, and at last, was able to breathe for the first time in days. I mean I was pretty much literally unable to breathe all afternoon, from the moment I found out that they meant it, for real, and that if I couldn't pull this huge amount of money together, I was going to be homeless in the morning. It's times like this I am so glad I don't have an addictive personality (well, except for Rice a Roni, sometimes) because this scariness would have driven me to a crack den at the very least, and quite possibly into some kind of permanent, panic-induced substance abuse. As it was, today I drank a Coke for the first time since last May. My first, and hopefully last, for 2009. Why? Because I don't have any controlled substances or alcohol in my office, and I really needed some kind of comfort, big time. And if sugar and caffeine could provide that, even for a moment, it was worth the elevated blood sugar.

So that is today's saga. While I'm still shaken, and upset, and I obviously need to go to the bank tomorrow to figure out what the hell happened to three month's worth of rent checks, oh and by the way figure out how to cope with the nearly $800 I had to pay in late fees and costs for calling off the medieval torture hour tomorrow, along with trying to devise some method for me to be less of an idiot and slightly more on top of my finances (Good lord, who did I get this freaking lack of organization gene from? Why do I suspect the Rosenthal side in this?) I am still utterly and completely relieved that I have a home to go home to, and a mom who could provide a bailout package - much of a sacrifice as it was to her - without even batting an eye. "We're family," she said earlier this week, as I sat in her living room, wondering why this was happening to me and scared that something was really wrong. "If something happens, we help each other. That's what we do."

So I'm a very lucky girl. Lucky to have family and friends that care. Lucky to have a roof over my head. And lucky not to have been separated from my stuff, and subjected to mockery and pelting with rotten vegetables.

I guess this means that I need - really need - to get organized. And start being a grownup. Even if that means being a creative grownup. I'm just hoping being one doesn't necessarily mean sacrificing the other. But hopefully it won't. I don't ever want to go through an experience like this again.

The lesson for today - live, learn...and be grateful. And check your bank statements.

Peace, y'all.