The Andi Chronicles

The Real McCoy

2010-05-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

I have absolutely no business writing a blog post right now; I've got a talk to finish for tomorrow night and notes to write for a presentation next week, but I couldn't let the day pass without saying something about the passing of Law & Order. If you know me, and if you happen to be a reader of this fine but lately neglected blog, then you know that one of my favorite pastimes is passing the time with my favorite fictional New York City detectives. In fact, my personal concept of God - if I am indeed created in Her image - is a vision of a vibrant, full-figured, thoughtful and creative woman who often retires to the couch with a carton of cold lo mein and a DVR full of Briscoe and Green.

I was a regular from the beginning. Mainly because I found myself, in 1990, away from New York and everyone and everything I loved. I was one of those kids who went away to college because everyone else was doing it. But I was homesick as hell, and hating every moment of my academic and social life at Delaware. Law & Order gave me a chance to go home for an hour every week. Even more so, because my dad, as many of you know, was a retired NYC detective. Every Thursday morning of the regular season (and even some repeats) from the show's premiere until his death in 2005, my dad would call me to discuss, recap and rate the episode.

Some of them were direct plot links to cases he worked on (the one featuring the murder of a violinist from the "Manhattan Symphony Orchestra" comes to mind), while others were cases that his friends worked. And some, as he said, were just plain bullshit, made up by writers who didn't know jack about police procedure. "If you're going to write, Ann," he'd say the morning after a particularly unsatisfying episode, "get your facts straight. Don't make it up. Ask people who know." My dad always chuckled at Adam Schiff, remembering his own days working for Robert Morgenthau in the DA's office on the Detective Task Force, his last assignment. And there was plenty of insider language that made the show real to us both. Whenever I heard terms like DD-5, Jade Squad, Molyneux and Miranda, it felt like home.

As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I was homesick at Delaware was because after I expressed an interest in applying to NYU, my father, that very Detective First Grade from Manhattan South, whose stint as a member of the Sixth Precinct put him smack in the middle of Greenwich Village in the late 70s, gave me my own personal tour of the campus. "Yeah, I investigated five or six murders here," he said confidingly, as we walked together through Washington Square Park, munching hot pretzels from the vendor cart. "One of them was a castration with pliers. That was pretty bad. Then there was the serial rapist on Jane Street. He got more than twenty women before we were able to make an arrest. Then you've got the drug dealers on West Fourth. And of course, the underground bomb factory on MacDougal. Yep. Tough town," he said, brushing the salt from his fingers. And before I knew it, I was a freshman in Newark, Delaware, on a campus known more for its chemistry labs than its meth labs.

As the years progressed, and changes were made to the cast, my dad usually had a comment or two about it. DA Nora Lewin (Dianne Wiest) was a bleeding heart liberal loser who'd never get re-elected. Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm) was an idiot who wouldn't have lasted three minutes in the DAs office. Fontana? Guy's a crooked cop. And the plot line about McCoy and Kincaid was too much of a soap opera. He just wanted to see good cases in the hands of competent actors. The passing of Jerry Orbach, just a few months before his own death, was hard for us both. Faced with seeing the names of his friends, one by one, appearing in the obituary column of The Gold Shield newsletter he got every month, the departure of Detective Briscoe was a reminder of times gone by, of an era that had passed - of the institutional memory of a department he served giving way to a new era of detectives who were younger, tech-savvy, and sometimes even female.

I'd always been a loyal viewer, but following the events in the fall of 2001, I became something of a junkie. My dad didn't love the 9/11 story lines all that much. "Too political," he'd say on the phone on Thursday morning. "I don't mind Fred Thompson, but Dick Wolf is trying too hard." I, on the other hand, loved seeing my own experience of the city where I worked and commuted and panicked on a regular basis. The 9/11 story lines never felt exploitative to me. They made me feel as if I wasn't alone.

One night in 2005, a few months after my father died, when I still wasn't quite used to the sound of the silent phone on Thursday morning, I was having dinner on the West Side with a friend of mine, when Sam Waterston walked into the restaurant. He looked exactly the same as he did on the show: jacket slung over one shoulder, heavy brows, kind smile. He was seated with three other people at the table next to mine. Now, I'm not a fangirl, but my heart was seriously palpitating at the sight of one of my character heroes. I remember wanting to say that I loved the show, that it was, in many ways, what had gotten me through 9/11, what was getting me through the loss of my dad. That it was a comfort to me to know that the fight for justice still went on, even if it was fictional. But I didn't say anything at all. As we got up to leave, I looked back at him just as I was about to walk out the door. He looked up at me and smiled. It was enough.

I know that the show will live on in reruns, and that the sixty seven episodes on my DVR should be well enough to keep me going for quite some time. I even know that I haven't been the most loyal viewer for the past couple of seasons. Once it left the Wednesday 10PM time slot, it was hard to find; I didn't know these new detectives; I was baffled by some of the story lines. And I knew I could always find the comforting ones - the old school episodes - on TNT. As the show slid into jepoardy every season, and the press picked up the story, I became aware that I was part of a coterie of smart, cool women who were completely addicted to L&O. And I always knew that the cancellation was coming. Even I, for so many years a regular in the squad room, thought that it was going downhill fast.

And now the time has come. As the prayer book - and George Harrison - tells us: all things must pass. All that lives must die. My father's L&O seasons - fifteen in all - still remind me of what it was like to be a child of the NYPD, of what those stories and cases and trials meant to him and to me. That the people were represented by two separate, but equally important groups - the police, who investigate crimes, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. That their stories were our stories. And that "justice, justice, you shall pursue" wasn't just a hollow saying. That pursuing justice is serious business, no matter what sort of wisecracks got cracked in the process. That doing the right thing wasn't a joke. "If I were joking," said Detective Lenny Briscoe, "I'd be wearing a fez, and no pants."

The Wailing Wall of Facebook and My First Anti-Semite!

2010-03-14T17:01:00.000-07:00

I'm the first to admit that sometimes, especially as a Jew by Choice, I take my Jewish identity a little too seriously. Anyone who knows me through my temple could tell you that: I serve on seven different committees (down from eight last year); I'm a member of the board of trustees, a regular at Shabbat services and at the Torah study table on Saturday mornings. More than even my Jewish identity, however, I'm a huge advocate for Interfaith bridge building. Why? Because this is where I come from, as an interfaith kid. To that end, I teach a session on conversion and interfaith Outreach for every student taking Intro to Judaism through the Union for Reform Judaism in NYC. I even did a stint as a Jewish educator for the Interfaith Community of New York. I'm even a twice-trained Schindler Outreach Fellow for my congregation, which means that I work with people in the process of conversion, and with families where there is never going to be a conversion, to help integrate people into life at our temple.

And life at our temple is pretty sweet. It's a home for a lot of wonderful people I know, both Jewish and not Jewish. That's why we were selected to host a weekend for 15 rabbinic students from the Reform seminary campuses in New York and Cincinnati. I think the students had a great time with us. I think some of them had their worlds turned upside down. And I think that we, as a congregation, were not exactly what they expected.

Imagine a sanctuary where people of many diverse faiths come together in a place we all call home for a great Shabbat celebration on Friday night. Where I read Torah in honor of dozens of families who not only raise intelligent and sensitive Jewish children, but families where the parents themselves are wonderfully connected and involved in their own right. Where temple leaders, both Jewish and Christian, stand on the bimah to share their journeys of faith and open-mindedness. A place where I taught not only is conversion not for everyone, but it's not even remotely a requirement. Because our central prayer, "You shall love the Lord your G-d" begins with the same Hebrew grammar construction as the commandment, "You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The one thing I hoped the students would take away from this weekend was that loving the stranger brings us closer to G-d - and that loving the stranger is not conditional on them joining the tribe.

It was a wonderful weekend. My highlight was having the opportunity to facilitate a panel with four of our temple community's teenagers, where they answered questions from the students in such an amazingly articulate way that I wanted to get up and cheer. They told truths to the students that I would be too intimidated to admit. That before my conversion, I always referred to myself as half Christian and half Jewish, because it made life easier, and I didn't want to be disconnected from either side of my heritage. And when two of those young women, raised as Jews, admitted to still really liking Christmas, because it is a family holiday and, as one said, "You HAVE to love Christmas!" it was as if I was getting to talk out loud, too.

The weekend, as one might imagine, took a huge amount of work to put together. Housing the students. Making sure they arrived safely. Providing transportation. Arranging all the meals. Getting people to host Shabbat dinners. Making sure various medical issues, dietary restrictions, and pet allergies were taken into account. I had a fabulous, energetic, awesome committee who gave me all the help I needed and more. But let me tell you, by the time it was over - and it was over early due to a huge storm that knocked power out at the temple - I was exhausted.

Maybe that's why I didn't answer as nicely as I could have when a Facebook friend - a former neighbor in my old building in Larchmont - sent me a message this morning, asking (not for the first time) why I keep my Facebook wall private. Now, I do this for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that some time ago, someone innocently posted something on my Wall that contained some bad language. This doesn't really bother me, really, but at the time I was working at a company where my Facebook was under scrutiny much of the time. It was a post you wouldn't want impacting your professional life. So I deleted it and made my Wall private from that point on.

This friend, who as I said was a former neighbor, is definitely a little - not really sure how to say it - OK. Crazy. When I lived across the hall from her, she would stalk me after work, when I got home, and spend hours upon hours talking about herself, herself, herself, her life, her love problems, her family problems - more information than you'd really want to know in a lifetime. She seemed to be in conflict with a lot of people - most of her stories were about fights she was having in the various relationships in her life. And honestly, it was 2002, working in downtown NYC, and I was having enough problems of my own.

It wasn't a real friendship. Rarely did she ask, or care, what was going on with me. She just thought, because we were near the same age, and single, and living on the same floor in the same building, that I was her best buddy. And this went on for months. I could never really get away from her because she'd listen for the elevator, or my key in the door, and she'd come into the hallway and start in. It was the nightmare neighbor scenario from every bad 70s sitcom. One night, after a really long day, I got home and true to form, she came yammering out into the hallway, yakking away, and I told her that I really needed some down time, and to be on my own. That I just. Couldn't. Listen. Right. Now.

This was apparently a bad thing to do. From that moment, the tantrums started. Yelling. Screaming, Slammed doors. Hostile notes shoved under my door. Emails telling me that I was a bad, horrible, selfish person who deserved to be alone and a workaholic. That I was a bad friend and never listened to her problems. That someone with her problems deserved sympathy and I was an even worse person for victimizing someone with all the life-stress she had. I have to say that as hurtful as her words were, I didn't really care. I was just relieved to finally have some quiet. It wasn't like the loss of a real friend that hurts you in your heart. It was a relief.

Turn the clock forward to 2009, about seven years later, when she finds me on Facebook.

At first all was fine. What is Facebook, anyway, but a way to keep certain people in your life, and others at a distance. I approved her as a friend, figuring what the hell. We didn't live in the same place anymore.

It immediately started. The crazy comments on my posts, the constant stream of narcissistic and silly posts from her in my news feed. One night, she decided to pick a fight with one of my friends in a comment thread. Before my REAL friend got into it with her, I hastily scrawled an email: Back off - not worth it - this one's a nut job.

Which brings me to today's message: why do I keep my Wall private? She wants to post some pictures of the new Don Draper Mattel Doll. Ha! Ha! LOL! LMAO! and whatever other stupid hysterical internet abbreviations you can imagine. Anyway, after this weekend of pure hard work and intense spiritual seeking, I was tired. Really f-ing tired. So I wrote back: I just like to keep my Wall private. It's that simple. Hope you are staying warm and dry.

This was apparently another bad thing to do.

I will now quote from her response:

You can keep your rude comments to myself, my mother is in the fucking hospital and has major surgery scheduled - How fucking DARE you respond to me in that manner - "It's that simple" - How's THIS - You are blatantly and offensively anti-Christian and anti-Catholic in your pro-Jew rhetoric that NOBODY cares about or wants to HEAR on Facebook!! .... Consider yourself blocked.

And one minute later:

Typo: Keep your comments to YOURSELF, not myself.
I was so infuriated, I cannot even TYPE straight. It's THAT simple. Resentful witch.

And so, a supreme irony. I spent this whole weekend teaching Outreach - a culmination of years of hard work, of trying to help people feel more at home at my temple regardless of their faith. A weekend advocating for the non-Jewish journeys of faith in my own home congregation. And being told that I am offensively pro-Jewish and anti-Christian. If it weren't so stupid, I'd laugh. And if I weren't so tired, I probably wouldn't have let it make me cry. But I did.

I think - hell, I know - that I'm exhausted. But the words, "pro-Jew rhetoric" gave me pause. I looked back on my Facebook page, and sure, there are links to stories in the Jewish press, Shabbat greetings, things going on in my temple. But it certainly isn't there to convert anyone, or make any of my Christian, Catholic, or Pagan friends feel weird or excluded. I mean, damn - half the time the people responding to my typical Friday night Shabbat shalom are my friends of other faiths. And much of the time, the stories I post are ones that are critical of stuff going on in the Jewish community.

So what does a person do when she finds out she was connected by Facebook to someone who clearly has a lot of anti-Jewish hostility brewing beneath her surface? I don't know. But I think back to this past Friday night, when I lifted my voice in a duet on the bimah with my first Temple friend, not Jewish like I was when I first arrived at my congregational home. Or of my friend Jill, who spoke about her connection to our community not in spite of - but because of her deep Christian faith. Or of all my Jewish friends from Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, cultural and secular backgrounds. How different we all are. And how, in the end, it doesn't matter. What this person distinctly does not share with my friends is a sense of humanity. No one whom I trust, no one with whom I actually want to hang out or spend time, online or in person, is as full of conflict and hostility and hate as she is.

So what I'm trying to focus on is how I am really bound to all of my friends by something even better than sharing a faith in common: by the fact that we're all human and decent and trying to make a good life for ourselves and the people we care about. And that we all try to be good people. And maybe that's the lesson of Outreach for me this weekend.

I did respond to the horrible emails I received, and I was honest. I said that I was deeply hurt and sad by what she said about my faith, and that her emails brought me to tears. I also said that I hoped her mother would recover and that she herself would find the strength and grace and wisdom to care for her.

And my final hope for her is, in the illustrious words of my people: a meshugenem zol men oysshraybn un dikh araynshraybn.

2009-10-14T12:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-13T11:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-14T13:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-22T08:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-07T19:09:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-03T14:40:00.001-08:00

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?

2009-02-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

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)

2009-01-29T13:30:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-16T15:32:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-14T15:11:00.000-08:00

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.

What I Learned On My Winter Vacation

2009-01-05T09:11:00.000-08:00

I guess the most important conclusion I came to is that there is no way in hell I am making my self-imposed deadline of April 24th for this book to be done. In fact, for the second time in as many months, I had to take a deep breath, stop what I was writing, and start over again. I've got about 10 pages of stuff I can work with, but I had to go back to the basics and begin my outlines over again.

It's not so much that the story isn't going anywhere, it's just that I keep getting bogged down in the details. Something in me wants to report every footstep, every moment, every heartbeat, but for one thing, it would make the book a thousand pages long, and for another, it would be some mighty boring reading. So I've got a journal, and I've handwritten my notes so far, and my timelines, and hopefully this will help me to hit the actions / scenes / points on the trajectory that I need to make happen, along with weaving in the outside elements that will hopefully give the story a broader perspective.

Today is my first day back in the office and while I'm glad to be here, I'm having some trouble making the transition back. Mostly because I just want to write, but I don't want to write the projects that I have to work on. And I'm feeling, like everyone else who is back after ten days of vacation, more than a little swamped. And more than a little worried about all of the things I have to accomplish.

And then there's the other stuff. Like finding out how you react in your secret heart when you hear that your first serious boyfriend and his wife are expecting twins. It makes you wonder how the Universe really works. It makes you wonder exactly what is being handed out, fairly and unfairly. Some of us get scars on our knees, still visible, from the day we landed on that sidewalk at the bottom of a flight of concrete stairs in South Philly. Others get marriage and children. And it makes you wonder what you really want. It makes you wonder what you should be grateful for.

Just a song before I go...

2008-12-30T11:19:00.000-08:00

I guess 2008 is ending with me in a better place than where I started: Borders! No, seriously, I am sitting here with an unfortunate case of massive writers' block, unusual since I finally have some time and space to make a dent in this book o'mine. But honestly, I'm a little tired/stunted/not in the mood to relive these events, so I'm stalling for the moment.

Anyway, I am definitely tired right now, having had the demon methotrexate this morning (and as a result, the naughty beast nephews for whom I babysat this AM are getting a lot of mileage out of the shot in the butt) and also knowing it's a matter of time before I'm too tired, nauseous and generally wiped out to do much more than crash on the couch in front of whatever Law and Order permutation is on NBC tonight. But even more than that, I'm tired by the notion of writing this story, of making a hated entity come to life on paper, of reexamining the futility of those events, and having to remember a truly painful and bewildering time. But, it's a great story, worth the writing, and certainly worth the potential selling.

So the year comes to an end tomorrow, and fortunately, this does not mean that at sunset, I am in for six hours of singing with four to follow in the morning, which is a good thing. I'll take Seacrest over some of the high holiday liturgy if I have to. Especially since I am about as big a fan of the October holidays as I am of New Year's Eve. What a crap excuse for people to get wasted and act like a collective horse's ass, freeze their idiocy off in Times Square, and make others miserable because of some post-20th century expectation of sentimentality and perfection? (Whoa, how's that for some pretentious sociological nonsense?) All of which is to say I'm not a fan of NYE, haven't really had a good one since I was young enough to believe in the nonsense, having gotten completely hammered at some dive Irish bar in the city and ended up at Veselka's or somewhere like that, after having slept on someone's floor for about three hours. Anyway that was a long time ago, in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

Or not dead yet. So here's the tally on '08: 42 pounds lost, four sizes down, two hundred points of blood sugar up, 48 methotrexate injections, six months without regular Coca-cola (still killing me), four births (not mine), two engagements (also not mine), two funerals, six shiva minyans, three bags of frozen tortellini, two Shabbat services, six high holiday services, one Torah aliyah (gotta do better in 09 with that), three chapters, one deferment, five days in California, two dinner parties, fourteen active contracts, one BlackBerry, seven trips to Toys R Us, one personal shopping session, twelve Intro classes, too many episodes of classic Law and Order, and many, but still too few, adventures with the people I love.

Not a bad run, all told. And having hopefully eased the writer's block, I should get back to work; the hours are dwindling and the story remains untold. But here's to a New Year, a new beginning, fewer defenses, more laughter, a new administration, less war, happier times, and lasting peace.

Shalom.

Breaking News: A Great Miracle Happened...

2008-12-24T07:33:00.000-08:00

...at the garage yesterday: the Infiniti passed inspection! And only cost me $600 in repairs! It's a Hanukkah miracle...and what a relief. I swear to G-d that the check engine light is taking years off my life at this point; for every one day it should be on, it is on for no less than eight days, and apparently the car was leaking oil, so...'tis the season. But it wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected, given that the past two inspections have resulted in a transmission overhaul and a brake job. And seriously, I thought that there was so much wrong with the car that it would be another $2K hit at least. Thank you, Judah Macabee!

I do have to get the muffler repaired (thanks to all my friends who have been pointing out that "bottoming out" noise for some time) and a couple of brackets replaced, but it's such a relief to see the blue 2009 sticker where it should be.

And not a moment too soon; the ice has made my building's parking lot so unsafe that it's been impossible to get the car in and out for the past two nights. The first night, I threw myself on the mercy of the Diner folks and they graciously let me leave the car there overnight, and last night I lucked into a spot on the street. But it's not pretty: hopefully the rain will make it all better by tonight.

OK, gotta get some work done before I leave the office for TEN DAYS OFF! I will be working on book #2 during the next week, and I'm excited to get this story down on virtual paper, finally, and given that it needs to be done by April 24, 2009, it's not a moment too soon for me to put in some serious work on it. So wish me luck, and happy holidays to all and a gear New Year, or as the song goes...let's hope it's a good one, without any tears.

We are experiencing technical difficulties....please stand by.

2008-12-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

Who remembers this from when we were kids? It always seemed to happen during after-school cartoons. You'd be sitting there with your cookies and Tang or your cheese sandwich and Quik, innocently watching Bugs and Daffy or Tom and Jerry beat the crap out of one another and presto: some stupid transmission issue would result in what seemed like HOURS of psychedelic color bars accompanied by "Theme from 'A Summer Place'" with a completely sincere voice intoning the magic words. And all you'd want was to get back to the action. Given that we had, maybe four other channels to choose from, rarely did I ever change it. This was, of course, when you had to change the channel by getting up off your dead ass and turning a dial ATTACHED TO THE SET. So here were the choices: good cartoons on 5, live action drug-induced insanity (Magic Garden, Joya's Fun School, Banana Splits) on 11, endless BOR-ing episodes of Little Rascals on 9, and sanctimonious 70s touchy feely happy programming on 13.

Anyway, right about now I'd give just about anything to be six and sitting in front of the TV. The technical difficulties are as such: I'm STILL sick (week four) so I'm not sleeping a whole lot, I wake up at least 4 or 5 times a night, usually in a cold sweat out of a nightmare (yeah, Nazis this week!) My family is experiencing some fallout from the downturn (Mom's hours cut, brother in law's company shutting down in March, etc) so there's some worry there. And the general tension of the holidays is, well, what it is.

So I have not been blogging a whole lot. I have, however, considered composing a mock-Italian opera based on the recent reunion debacle. But it is hardly a story worth the telling. I just hope it's over by now.

At the end of the month I am planning on taking some time off to work on the 2nd book, although a recent whisper in my ear has encouraged me to do a different book first - a conversion/outreach book - but I don't know if I have the energy right now. Or if the publishing industry has a need. Something to explore, perhaps.

Thus, if I'm not around/online/posting for the next couple of weeks, I wish you all a happy holiday. Please stand by.

One of these things is not like the others...

2008-12-11T09:45:00.000-08:00

I know it's been a while, but there have been some good reasons for not posting. First, I've been completely overwhelmed at work with a lot of projects, which is a good thing in this toilet economy, but a bad thing for those of us who used to take 20 minutes or so out of the day to update our blogs. And out of respect for my dear ones who have been casualties of the downturn, I feel like it's almost a bitchy thing to blog about my stupid/kvetchy issues when they have so much more to worry about - believe me, I've been there.

Second, I've been sick for about three weeks with a sinus bugaboo which has been more of a pain in the ass than an actual illness, but just the same it's preventing me from sleeping adequately, and on the nights I do actually get some sleep, I get hit with numerous fever dreams which are so scary and soul-shaking (plane crashes, being trapped inside burning houses, big old jet air-o-liners hitting burning buildings, I could continue but you get the picture) that I usually have trouble functioning the next day. Not exactly conducive to creativity, or anything else other than getting through the day, going to that night's meeting or class, and then going home to eat leftover casserole in front of Law & Order repeats.

But anyway...it's been a pretty crazy few weeks. I was sick for Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, which I love because it involves no religion whatsoever. And also, and quite wonderfully, I have reconnected via Facebook with a number of former classmates from elementary school. I can't even begin to tell you what this has meant to me, since those were probably the happiest years of my childhood - way happier than when I ended up in public school. For your amusement, here's a scene from spring of 1978. Can you spot the Jew?

More to come...back to work.

Warming up for NaNoWriMo

2008-11-10T08:49:00.001-08:00

Update: it's been a while, and in the meantime, Obama WINS! Yay!

There's a lot I could say about the election, but thousands and thousands of words have already been written. Suffice to say that I cried when they called it for Obama. Like so many others, I feel like we've been living in a really bad place for the past eight years, and now there's hope for the future.

On the writing front, I'm trying to (temporarily) focus away from blogging during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which I signed up for on October 31. Nothing like putting things off till the last minute. And if that means anything, I'll probably be attempting to write 50,000 words on November 30th.

Although I have promised myself some hours today to re-start, jump-start, and otherwise begin the new opus: Not for PRofit/Mission Statement/Title TBD. I've got until April 24, 2009 to finish it. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, the virtual RA crew team - i.e., the guys who show up in the middle of the night with great big mighty wooden oars to get in a beat-down of my joints have been hanging out in the neighborhood lately. They must be, otherwise I have no explanation for hurting so bad in the past week. Oh well: that's why the Holy One invented Vicodin.

I'll be over at StarCrossed later today (I hope.) More to come.

The Infiniti, and beyond

2008-10-31T10:40:00.000-07:00

It's October 31, and much to my chagrin, the car remains uninspected. It was due in September, and now I'm 60 days over. I'm worried and trying to figure out where and how to find the time to get my baby over to the garage, but I can't seem to find a plan that will work.

For eleven years, I drove a Toyota Corolla. Blue, four-door, '89 sedan, a real workhorse. When my '83 Corolla Hatchback lost its muffler on the way home for winter break from college one December day, I didn't know what I would do. The car had been in two major accidents, and wasn't exactly reliable. I knew my parents didn't feel great about me driving back and forth more than 120 miles each way with a tempermental car, and besides, there were these big stupid buses all over campus - I probably didn't need the car after all.

But when I came downstairs one morning, a couple of days before I had to leave to go back for spring semester, my dad announced, "We're giving you the blue car." It was brand new, we'd only had it for about six months. I couldn't believe that I was getting a new car, just like that, for doing nothing. My immediate response was: "What have you done with my parents?"

I drove that car until 2001 - from the time I was 19 until I was 31. I was convinced the car had some kind of divinely-inspired autopilot, considering how many times I drove that car, completely not paying attention to the road, speedometer, or other drivers. I put more than 150,000 miles on that car and never got hurt once.

But eventually, it blew a head gasket and it had to go. We donated it to the Diabetes Foundation. I remember being really depressed about it, thinking I was completely devastated at losing this symbol of my youth. Two days later was 9/11, which kind of put things into perspective.

After that I leased my sweet little Sentra - first the gold one, which was the unfortunate recipient of the karmic blast intended for eleven years of not watching the road - within eight weeks it was totaled in a bad five-car pile up on the FDR Drive. Nissan was fabulous and let me apply the two whole payments and my deposit to a new car. I went over to the dealership one cloudy Sunday afternoon, and picked out a red one.

When my dad passed away, I agreed to buy his beloved Infiniti from my mom, even though I still had 9 months to go on my Sentra lease. The Infiniti was old, but it was paid for, and driving it felt like driving around in a living room. During the past six months before he died, I drove it more frequently as he distanced himself more and more from the things he loved, including driving. We'd go up to visit my sister in Connecticut and he'd mention that he didn't really feel up to the trip home, that I could handle the car better than he could in the dark - something he never really believed before. In retrospect, maybe we should have known there was something wrong.

Now the Infiniti is mine, and I think my dad would pretty much freak out to see it. He kept it neat as a pin - he was as meticulous about his cars as he was about everything else. Now it's got a trunk full of books and dry cleaning and china that my mom gave me but that I haven't brought upstairs yet, the backseat has boxes (again, yet to be brought upstairs) and there is a Torah, a Tanakh and a siddur on the front seat. Talk about being a wandering Jew. I could lead services in my car if I were so inclined. And you could probably get a minyan in there if you took out all the crap in the back.

But it does need to be inspected, and I need to find the time. I don't know where it is going to come from, or how I am going to explain to the Powers that Be here that I need a day where I can work from home and be without the car. This can't go on much longer. Even the Infiniti is beholden to a higher power.

Rainy Day Women #22 & #38

2008-10-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

It's an ideal weather day here in White Plains: cold, rainy, and windy, with leaves tumbling down all over the roads. My favorite kind of day. Yeah, I know I'm not exactly in the majority on this opinion.

But it's a good day to be exhausted, and not feeling 100%, and if I didn't have to be in the office today I'd be curled up with my friend Sally's book, with a pot of chili bubbling on the stove and maybe even a challah in the oven. One of my ambitions this year is to learn how to bake my own, even though technically, I suppose, I shouldn't be eating it.

As much as I'd love to cocoon up and forget about the world, I know it's not a realistic expectation. I can only be grateful for my easy job and the fact that it's insanely busy here - which brings great hope for surviving the recession. Sure, I'm not making nearly enough money, and every month is a struggle in spite of the two new dresses bought on sale, and the new shoes I have to occasionally buy for more than I've ever spent on shoes before, because they are really good for people with RA. Right now I'm grateful for my job, and for the apartment I can curl up in even though it's a freaking mess, and for the fact that I was never smart enough to go into the financial world.

When I graduated from college in '92, the economy sucked - not quite as badly as it does now - but it wasn't a good market for new graduates. On the strength of my summer job as a bank teller (which my dad arranged for me), I was accepted into a management training program at a small bank in Fleetwood, about a 20 minute drive from my parents' house.

That was an easy job too, but I hated it. I hated the branded uniformity of the environment, the stupid stock photos on the walls, the sense of confinement in the tiny branch, the strict 30 minute lunch break, having to wear a suit and stockings and heels every day, and the rotten attitudes of the veterans who thought all of the young people were idiots. Not to mention that the manager, a Mariah Carey fanatic, insisted on Muzak renditions of all her greatest hits, played incessantly over the branch sound system, all day. But above all, I hated the sense that this was it - this was the future - surrounded by people who cared about nothing but money. I had spent four years studying the literature of the Holocaust. My boyfriend was 2 hours away, in Philadelphia, cheating on me with anyone he could find. It was not a good time. But as people kept telling me, I had a job, and that was the important thing. I was miserable, but my parents explained it away - that was what the working world was all about - I would have to learn how to deal with it.

One night, I was over at my friend Meg's house - her parents were away so we were hanging out, drinking Coronas and peeling peaches for pie - in despair of my future and its bleak, conformist outlook. At around 4AM, in a haze of lime-scented alcohol and a pile of pie-crust trimmings, Meg convinced me to quit. I decided to table the decision for another couple of hours.

When I woke up at 8AM, the rain was pouring down - it was a day much like this one - with a wind tossing the leaves from the trees. I reached for the phone and called my boss to let him know that I wouldn't be coming in; that in fact, I wouldn't be coming back.

Needless to say, my parents weren't too happy with me. But it wasn't the right fit for me - it would never be the right fit no matter how many chances I gave it. It was only three weeks later that I landed a new job - an editorial proofreader at the Pennysaver, where I made even less money than I had as a management trainee. But it was full of creative people - cool young people in jeans and sneakers - where we got 45 minutes for lunch, and could blast whatever music we felt like playing. Sure, we had our fair amount of suits and crazies, but at least they were real. And best of all, there wasn't a hint of Mariah Carey to be heard.

I went from there to grad school, and then on to marketing, and now here we are, sixteen years after that rainy day hangover that helped me to move to a new path. Standing at the crossroads again, I can only wonder this time what the rain will bring.

Bereshit

2008-10-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning, my weekly Torah study group, along with thousands of b'nei mitzvah children all over the world, will begin the Torah over again. The beginning comes, in my opinion, at the exact perfect moment, when the chill in the air and the gorgeous vibrant leaves and the deep azure of the Sound all bring the beauty of G-d's handiwork into sharp focus. It's as if, no matter what troubles or joys you are facing, you simply have to notice what a beautiful world we live in. And as a writer, very few narratives intrigue me as much as our sacred story of creation. Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim v'et ha'aretz - in the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth - is one of those perfect first lines - in fact, it is THE perfect first line. And I think any writer worth their keyboard would agree.

Consider how some of the most compelling and intriguing stories begin with lines like: Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. Or, Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet. The perfect combination of wanting to know more about the character and the action inherent in the text. From the moment you read it, you're hooked. Face it: you can't let the story go.

When I think about "in the beginning" it always makes me wonder. The beginning, by definition, can only take place once. And yet in life, we are innundated by beginnings, second and third acts, countless chances. The old saw, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression" is a powerful statement, but I'm curious as to whether it is actually true. Our gift of teshuvah, of personal evolution, of the ability to turn and change, and the not-so-unimportant blessing of other people's short term memory gives us that second chance all the time.

Just like with Torah: every year, we begin again. We rarely read it the same way twice. In each reading cycle, we are informed by internal and external circumstances, life changes, personal experience, and the opinions and ideas that other people bring to the table. The fact that we are not supposed to study alone makes that last quality perhaps the most important. Reading about the death of Miriam one year made me consider the justifiable frustration and anger of B'nei Yisrael having been "led on" through the desert, and now facing a crisis of inadequate water and supplies for the journey. A year later, having faced incalculable loss in my own life, all I could see was a distraught and grieving Moses simultaneously struggling to lead a people and mourn for his sister. That point of view had, of course, been at the table the year before - many of those teachers of Torah with whom I share in study every Shabbat had the knowledge way before I did. But it took looking at the text through my own lens of mourning to see it clearly.

Beginning again is also the hallmark of so many aspects of my own life: by definition, the writer is always beginning, whether it is a new book, a new chapter, a new sentence. And as is the case with so many fellow Jews-by-Choice, living life in a new faith and according to a new set of lifecycles accounts for numerous beginnings throughout the learning process of becoming Jewish -- and beyond. Consider the process: taking Intro to Judaism; beginning Hebrew classes. Starting with aleph instead of the letter A. Realizing that your day now starts at sundown rather than sunrise. Even figuring out how to keep kosher (which I still haven't managed to do) or how to conduct that first Seder or bake that first Rosh HaShana apple cake calls for looking at things in a way you've never seen them before, beginning again, over and over. It is certainly no accident that many of us who have trained as URJ Outreach Fellows call our discussion group for Jews-by-Choice "New Beginnings."

As I wrote recently, sometimes being at the beginning again can be scary. It is learning how to mark time and move forward poised between old knowledge and new, between who you've been and whom you've yet to become. Perhaps still reacting to old ghosts and ideas from the past and perhaps fearing what the future holds. It's an odd place to be.

But as my dear friend Reb Marci taught me in our recent online discussion about the death of Moses, Torah does not really allow us to dwell in the past; the story's very momentum commands us to move forward. And before we know it we are back at the table, in awe as our eyes behold the heavens and the earth, the stars in the firmament and every living thing according to its type. And perhaps there is nothing more perfect to say than the Holy One's own words: Ki tov.

Dancing with the Story

2008-10-21T06:37:00.000-07:00

Sitting at the chevra Torah table this past Saturday morning, when we got to the end of the final verse, the one that reads: Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord singled out, face to face, for the various signs and portents that the Lord sent him to display...and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel - I'll admit it. I got choked up. Being at the end made me really feel as if I had accomplished something, in partnership with my study group. And at the same time, I was suddenly scared of being at the beginning, all over again.

V'zot Ha-Brachah - And this is the blessing - is the name of Torah's final parsha. In it, Moses and the Holy One survey the land in an echo of G-d's creation - the very moment we are returning to tonight, almost simultaneously - so that when we end the Torah and begin it again, we read without end, without interruption the final words - l'einei kol Yisrael - before the eyes of all Israel - and the first: bereshit - in the beginning.

So that leaves me asking the question: what is the blessing? Is the blessing that we are at the end, that Moses has become holier and more esteemed in death than when he was alive and working wonders, that the questions are past us and that we have to live with the answers we came up with this year? Or is the blessing that we're at the beginning again, with the questions still in front of us, and the answers still waiting for us to find them?

This question and tension comes at an interesting moment; this morning, I was suddenly motivated to start working again on this four-hundred page love letter of a novel that I've been messing around with in my head for almost two years: a book called Not for Profit, which details some of the ridiculous actions and incomprehensible personal ethics of people in the business of doing good. I've got an outline, and a couple of chapters written, but for me, the part of the story I am most passionate about is the last two thirds. The question is, do I scroll this baby out and write from the end to the beginning? Or do I do what I did with Bookseller's, and write it beginning to end?

Jewish text, in this case, isn't really helping me answer the question. The discussion in my head is more Talmudic than anything else. "If you write from the end," one idea tells me, "you can back into the story. You know how it ends this time. Remember: you didn't know last time. Wasn't that the problem?"

Still another point of view tells me to do what I've done in the past, that it's a successful method for me, that it is practical and methodical and normal to use a timeline and follow it so that by definition, its rigidity will give me a structure in which I can be more creative. But the timeline also has its cost: my last book suffered from being too literal in a lot of places. And I'm afraid of getting bogged down in bones of the story. Especially because, as many of you know, the story itself is so delicious.

In the same vein, and much in the same emotional context, I'm nervous about attending Simchat Torah services tonight. I'm not much of a dancer, and dancing with the scroll always makes me afraid that I'm going to drop it or trip over my own feet or do something stupid. Put me up on the bimah and ask me to sing, or set me down in front of a computer and tell me to write a poem, and I'm your girl. But ask me to dance or skip or paddle or skate, and it's almost as if I've been asked to fly. I tell myself that I am no good at any of it in an effort to figure out whether I'm healthy enough to try. And I don't know the answer. Do I dance because in my heart I know I will be okay, or do I start slowly - at the beginning - and try not to be afraid to ask for help if I need it?

And again, here I am, afraid of getting bogged down in the logistics of the dance, when what I should really be focusing on is the joy.

Especially because the story itself is so delicious.

Tzedek, tzedek tirdof

2008-10-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

My father Leo - may his memory be for blessing - had some definite ideas about justice. A 22-year veteran of Manhattan South Homicide, a detective first grade, and later in his second career, a tireless VP of Protective Control for Bank of New York, he spent a lifetime bringing people to justice, righting wrongs where he could, never afraid to stand up for what was right and see that the appropriate penalty was handed down. And he managed to do it all with tremendous style. Above all things he found a way to connect with people whether they were do-gooders or perps, always with an irrepressible grin and a twinkle in his eye. His way with people was a weapon far more powerful than the .38 he carried or the Glock he kept in the kitchen cabinet.

He cared about justice as much as he cared about his family, because he cared about families who had been touched by the damage that unchecked injustice can do. He never forgot a victim, never forgot a name, always made sure that he remembered that no matter what sort of evil or physical or emotional mutilation or destruction had occurred, that what he was bearing witness to was the human relationship of life-to-life in an ultimate transaction gone awry. He understood that all human beings contained the yetzer ha-tov and yetzer ha-ra - the good and evil impulse - in equal balance. But what he never let himself understand or accept was how people could justify their actions when they led to such a destructive end.

I saw him lose hours of sleep poring over the details of a case file, and come home in the early morning hours after a night spent in pursuit of a suspect. I remember the morning he came home after finally breaking the case of the murder at the Metropolitan Opera, when I was eleven years old. "We did it, Schnickelfritz," he whispered proudly as I padded down the stairs to greet him at our front door at five in the morning. And then, hurrying into the kitchen to grab a quick bagel with American cheese, he took the stairs two at a time to go up and change for the Commissioner's press conference. There was no mistaking it: justice realized energized him.

My dad understood that pursuing and obtaining justice was a team effort that required the cooperation of many discrete souls working towards one sacred goal. Fellow detectives. The officers who'd first responded, the coroner's office, the EMS teams, the crime scene technicians. The witnesses, the friends and family of the victim. And the random people you'd meet while following a lead, from the guy in the coffee shop or the mechanic or the bartender or the lady who lived next door to the crime scene. My dad could make a friend of all of them. You never knew who would give you what you needed to solve the case.

The toughest people he had to work with were the wrongdoers themselves. He hated the excuses, the lies, the rationalizations people gave him for doing the unspeakable - acting on their own selfish and destructive impulses, robbing people of their dignity, destroying the souls of the people left behind, turning a fellow human being into a victim, needlessly and recklessly abusing the ultimate power of G-d - ending a life -- and taking that power into their own hands. He could pretend a friendship with a criminal for the sake of getting what he wanted out of them - a confession of wrongdoing and if he was lucky, a willingness to accept responsibility for what they did. He was a big fan of the allocution process, when a person has to stand up in court and tell, for the record, what they did, in an unvarnished and factual statement. No justifications, no embellishments, no embroidering of the facts to manipulate the listener.

There were so many other people that my dad encountered during the course of an investigation - objective people, people with no investment in the outcome - who could tell the truth in a way that made it easy to see when someone else was lying. Not only did he work with the best in the business, but years of gathering honest testimony and witness statements made him absolutely pitch-perfect when it came to detecting the body language, tone of voice, and other characteristics of the liar. As a daughter, naturally, I got away with very little. To this day, I still believe that anyone who underestimates the ability of a New York City homicide detective to see through a lie is kidding themselves.

I've inherited some of his intolerance for injustice. Like my father, I do not suffer fools gladly. I do wish I had his way with people, but I am also too much my mother's stubborn and straightforward child to listen to lies and rationalizations with a smile, however insincere, on my face. I have very strong - perhaps too strong -- feelings about those whose deepest impulses drive them to hurt others, and then attempt to justify, rationalize and worst of all, cover up their actions.

To this end, the first Torah portion I ever learned how to chant, Shoftim, reflects this. Shoftim is the Hebrew word for judges, and the famous phrase above, Justice, justice you shall pursue, is at the heart of the parsha’s text.

The double justice we see in the text isn't there by accident. The way my dad, I think, would interpret it is that every crime has two stories: the truth of what really happened and then recognizing that vigilance is required to ensure that those facts are not in any way altered to gain sympathy or to rationalize the hurt that was caused to the victim. In my dad's view, the phrase, "I didn't mean for it to happen" was irrelevant. It happened, and nothing could undo those actions. The honorable thing to do is to accept responsibility, remember your actions and learn from them. Making an effort to change the story, or cover it up, or erase it was as much of an injustice as the crime in the first place.

For my dad, the pursuit of justice was as much about preserving the factual, ethical memory of wrongdoing as it was about making the bad guys accountable for their crimes. In Judaism, memory is the cornerstone of justice: remembering what was done to us to that we can learn from it and become better people. "May this memory be erased" is about the worst thing you can ever do or say - every person, every thing deserves to be remembered, both for good and for bad. We can't erase our actions, but we can take what we need to learn from them and move on. Without justification, without rationalization -- but with the hard-won wisdom we needed to gain from the experience.

Silence is not a Jewish value, nor should it be a human ethic. Because when the voice of the victim is silenced, and the injustice of that silence is followed by the memory of a crime being altered or erased, the opportunity to learn and grow vanishes with it.

When my father passed away three years ago, a friend suggested to me that as a way of finding comfort, I should choose a Torah portion or prayer moment to remember him by. While Shoftim was certainly the obvious choice, there is also a liturgical stronghold that has become a way for me to pay tribute to my father every Shabbat. During the second prayer of the Amidah, as we recognize the Holy One as one who “keeps faith with those who sleep in the dust,” I shift my prayer book in my arms so that I can touch my left hand – my dad was a lefty - to my heart.

My dad’s life was about keeping faith with those whose lives were shattered into dust, those who met with their final sleep too soon. He may not have been the most observant or exemplary Jew who ever lived. But his legacy is justice and remembrance, and the knowledge that lives in the world as a result of the ongoing struggle that we continue to face: ensuring that the truth of injustice is ever brought to light. As in the words of St. Thomas More: "In the things of the soul, remembrance without knowledge profits little."

Shabbat shalom.

Farewell to the Runway

2008-10-15T19:21:00.001-07:00

Well, Leanne won with her petal architecture in spite of Korto's beautiful use of color and beading. A lame end to a lame season, but I'm sad that it has come to an end nonetheless. I never expected to be a fan of Project Runway, but it has ended up influencing me in ways I am realizing now that it's all over (on Bravo at least. Results of the lawsuit against Lifetime are still, I believe, pending.)

I ended up a fan by accident. When I came home from that first stay in the hospital in September of 2006, I was in so much pain that I couldn't stay in my own apartment. At my mom's, I could barely make it from the downstairs bedroom into the living room. A raging bacterial infection had destroyed my left leg and settled into the bone marrow of my foot and ankle. Six days of intravenous antibiotics only succeeded in pissing the infection off even more. Just sitting in the car, coming back to my mom's house, was agony.

So when I arrived there with a purse full of the stuff they give you for anthrax (six weeks' worth!) there wasn't a lot I could do. Mom was working during the day; before she'd leave she'd set out sandwich and a glass of cranberry juice diluted with water, ice and a pitcher. I was barely managing on the crutches. She knew that I couldn't make it to the kitchen.

When she came back from work in the afternoon, she'd immediately turn the channel to Bravo. "You've got to watch this, Ann," she'd say. "I think you'll like it."

And like it I did. The insane personalities. The creative quirks. All the kooky ideas and fabrics and the trips to mood that felt like getting out early from school. Kayne and Jeffrey and Laura and Alison. The design process and Tim's comments. It reminded me of writing, my best writing and my best days of writing, amazing teachers and mentors who had guided me to be even better than I thought I could be, who didn't mind my occasional indulgences into self-reflection. It was wonderful.

But I wasn't. All that fall I just kept getting sicker and sicker. My walk and energy improved, but my bloodwork didn't. I went back to work, barely able to handle the piles that had accumulated on my desk during the three weeks that I'd been home sick. But no matter how tired I was, I always stayed awake for Runway. My mom and I watched the Couture challenge in Paris with eyes that never got tired of gazing upon the City of Light. "Just get better, Ann," she'd say, over and over. "Just get better, and we'll go."

I didn't get better. Not until that December, when I'd been let go from the job I wasn't dealing with, got an IV port installed in my arm and a dead, infected bone surgically removed from my foot. Then I started ten weeks of IV treatments, two a day, still at my mom's. It was gross. My hair fell out, my body ached, and my stomach hurt, not to mention the chronic cough thanks to an allergy to the heparin I had to use to flush the IV lines.

Together, my mom and I watched Jeffrey win, marveled at the appalling mediocrity of Top Design season one, and rooted for Betty to lose and Sam or Marcel to win on Top Chef. Bravo's reality gave us something to focus us away from the reality of sickness that had come to shape that fall and winter.

Now, two years later, still struggling to find wellness and move forward, I'm sad to see Runway roll up the white carpet and become part of the past. I think I'll miss it in the way I miss the old episodes of Law & Order. The same way that I feel when I see Lennie Briscoe and think of my dad, I think every time I see Tim Gunn I'll think of what it was like to be cared for again, and safe, even while doing battle with the most serious illness I've ever faced. As each designer fought to make each creation they were challenged with something that would ultimately adorn and beautify the bodies they were dressing, so it was with me, with pills and potions, medicines and Mom, trying to redesign reality, and make it work.

Bullies

2008-10-14T13:07:00.000-07:00

When I was in third grade, the kid who sat next to me didn't like something I said to him. As I recall, what I objected to was the fact that he had taken something out of my pencil case and failed to return it. So when we were filing back into our classroom, and while our teacher wasn't looking, he twisted my arm behind my back, wrenching my hand and breaking two fingers. I remember going to the hospital, laying my swollen hand flat on the x-ray table, the silver splints with their soft blue foam lining, and the sling I had to wear on my arm for two weeks. Kids being kids, sure. It happens all the time when you're eight.

But not when you're thirty-eight. Or at least, you'd hope. But over the course of the past two days, that very same kid who twisted my arm behind my back is trying to do the same thing, all because again, he doesn't like something I said. Only this time, it's online.

Last night I was subjected to four hours of barely literate, intimidating emails and wall posts on my Facebook page. All because a group of friends dared to call out a bully in their midst. And in the process, raise questions about the nature of the reunion that clearly were not welcome.

It got so bad that I had to cut off the conversation, as it had turned disrepectful, abusive, and more than a little threatening.

Clearly it doesn't matter what kind of education you get: a bully makes their intentions known with threats and demands, failing to engage in civil discourse and failing to recognize the fact that people have a right to their opinions and questions.

This all started because of the reunion controversy, which sadly has turned into a replay of high school. Instead of one united class, it's been cut in two. Us versus them. People are being forced to pick sides. Fights are breaking out, hearts once healed are broken, friendships once renewed are now splintered again. And blame is getting misplaced, everywhere you look.

While I am so proud of so many of my classmates for taking a stand, for calling out the bullies who have brought so much destruction and pain to this process, what I can't get over is that even twenty years later, how limited and immature these bullies have turned out to be. How angry they are that the people they once abused are now standing up for themselves. How they don't realize that no one really cares who has succeeded and who has failed, who is poor and who is rich, who realized their original dreams and who found other paths. The only real things anyone should care about are life and health and blessing. Nothing else matters.

But for some people, that same old role - that of the bully - is prevailing. For them, this reunion was a chance to show that even though their teachers had no faith in them, even though they shat on the assignments and never did the homework, that their greatest fulfillment was found in pushing people around, humiliating them and subjecting them to ridiculous cruelty, that they themselves are now successful. That they've outmaneuvered the kids who made them feel stupid.

However: they are stupid.

What they're seeing now is that the people they pushed around aren't willing to take it. That they are now able to stand up for themselves, usurping the bullies' power and status.

Nowadays, that sort of behavior isn't tolerated in schools. I don't care that we weren't safe then, from having fingers, hearts, spirits broken. It isn't going to happen now. Just like the fact that there are codes of law that protect adults, there are codes of conduct that protect children, higher standards, and above all a zero-tolerance policy for cruelty and abuse. Which is a good thing. The sooner kids can be broken of those tendencies, the better.

Because clearly, they don't go away.

Reunion Update

2008-10-13T12:23:00.000-07:00

I've been in touch with Jim S. today and I do think at some level he is sorry for the level of negativity he has unleashed on the reunion. I am still not planning to attend. But he has asked me to post an "apology" (and I use that term liberally) that he wrote early this morning to the original group of people Bill forwarded the email to. In the interest of fairness, I am doing so.

The "second email" that Jim mentions, for the record, was sent half an hour later and bascially was an attempt to retract the first. The damage, at this point, had been done. If it was meant to be a joke, and that is giving HUGE benefit of the doubt, it wasn't funny. I am also not sure how Bill was expected to know "it was a joke" since he literally hasn't spoken to Jim in 10 years.

I personally do not buy the joke scenario. I don't think he is fooling anyone and it's an insult to our intelligence to suggest otherwise.

I offered Jim the opportunity if he wanted to write another apology to the class and said I would be happy to post his note to my Facebook page and my blog, but this seems to be as far as he was willing to go.

I am not going to comment further; in fact I hope this is my last comment on the matter. We're all smart people: judge for yourself.
__________________________________________________________

I received your email this morning. Let me begin by simply saying the
original e-mail I sent Bill has been taken way way out of context. I
was completely kidding! To ensure Bill knew that I was kidding I
subsequently sent another e-mail right after the first indicating as
such. I further mentioned to Bill how I was looking forward to seeing
him and even addressed some of his very valid concerns.

I don't know why Bill would choose to send only the first e-mail knowing I
was kidding. I would never NEVER intentionally offend Bill or anyone
else like that. I am truly sorry for the miscommunication. Obviously,
my sense of humor is different than yours and that many others perhaps.
That's OK as it's what, in part, makes us all different. And if I
offended anyone with my sense of humor (or lack thereof) I am very
sorry. I'm not sure if you came to the 10th but we had an awesome time.
All we are trying to do is much of the same as 10 years ago. Please, if
I upset you or anyone else, accept my apologies. Again, I had no
intention to do so and now feel terrible about the whole matter.

Disgusting

2008-10-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

Jewish tradition dictates that one does not keep silent in the face of an injustice. Therefore, I am posting this email exchange (below) because I want people to see how one of the organizers of my 20th high school reunion has responded to constructive criticism with a disgusting and vitriolic email to a fellow classmate.

Our class website message board has been used to promote hateful comments about classmates, including racial slurs, anti-gay language, and believe it or not, jokes about gang-raping a classmate's mother.

Additionally, our reunion has been costed at $110 per person - not a huge amount but perhaps a hardship for many who are going through difficult economic times right now - who maybe don't feel comfortable swinging $110 (or $220 a couple for that matter).

Our HS held a dinner last week at the same location as the reunion for $35 per person. And no, there's no gift to the school being organized out of that amount.

When my friend Bill offered some ideas about the reunion, he received this response from the lead organizer.

All I have to say about this is: Once a bully, always a bully. I know that I'm not going to reward this behavior by attending, since for me, this has really taken away the good spirit that should surround a class get-together. I'm outraged and disgusted at this hate speech, pure and simple.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: Hey there/20th reunion...
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008 10:18:33 -0400
From: xxxxxx@xxxx.com
To: bill@XXXX.com

Bill,
I have a few suggestions of my own for you:
1. Why don't you step up and take the reigns for the 25th. You'd undoubtedly do better than Vern and me.

2. Come out of the cave you live in. More than 75% of the class is aware of the site and the reunion. A higher rate than most reunions.

3. If you can't afford $110 perhaps you need to find a better job.

4. STAY THE FUCK HOME. How's that for offensive?
I was torn between that and GO FUCK YOURSELF.

Thanks for listening to my suggestions Bill.

Regards,
Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: WILLIAM EDELSTEIN
Sent: Sat Oct 11 10:58:33 2008
Subject: Hey there/20th reunion...

Dear Jim and Chris,

I hope this email finds you well.

Thank you for all of the work that you have put into the 20th reunion. I know from my own planning of events that it is not an easy endeavor to engage people and coordinate all of the details. It is really wonderful that you put together that website and has helped us all begin to reconnect. I am hopeful I can attend but it isn't the greatest weekend for me.

I apologize for sounding like a Monday morning quarterback but I am only learning of this all and I had a couple of suggestions that I hope you will be receptive to hearing. I have only recently moved back to NYC after being out west for nearly seven years.

I think that you might want to reconsider how elaborate this event is going to be given the current economic climate. We are scaling back all of our events at work this fall due to everything going on. It may help to bring more people to the event if you just kept it more simple thereby lowering the cost. $110 is pretty high -- especially for couples -- perhaps lowering the cost to $80 per person (and refunding those people who already paid) might be a consideration.

I also have to be honest -- I know that the website message board has really been a forum for people to just let loose and reconnect but many of the comments are offensive. People, including me, have looked at that board and have been offended which doesn't bode well for garnering interest in this reunion. I do not feel comfortable attending a reunion with what has been referred to and is still up on that board...and I'm not the only one.

In any case, take my suggestions as you will -- I mean no disrespect. I found you both to be really welcoming at the last reunion...and I wish you only the best.

Best regards,
Bill

______________________________________________________

Comments are welcome.

Biblical Prohibition of the Day

2008-09-23T12:15:00.001-07:00

From the TMI department....there just might be something about that ancient religious prohibition against women cooking whilst, well, incapacitated by the monthly visitor.

Last night, I got home from my Board of Trustees meeting, all exhausted and pissy and starving. So I put some leftovers in the toaster oven and boiled up some frozen tortellini in some soup. Anyway, as it hit the boiling point, I did my usual, turn off the heat and cover. Only I forgot to turn off the heat. So my lovely tortellini soup ended up something like this:

(This was actually someone's pear and wine reduction that she left on the stove for three hours. Believe it or not, the tortellini looked pretty damn close to this. Just less pink.)

And as if that wasn't bad enough, apparently my leftovers from the Cheesecake Factory (half a chicken sandwich) were, unbeknownst to me, wrapped in plastic. My toaster oven? Doesn't like plastic so much. I'll spare you the photo.

For some reason, the Visitor tends to make me spazzy. Clumsy, moody, prone to accidents in the kitchen and outside. But this was the worst so far. I don't think my saucepan is going to survive this. It's sitting in my sink and as of this morning, the burn marks weren't going anywhere. And the smell is even worse. Like someone set a recycling bin on fire.

Moral of the story: I am so doing take-out for the rest of the week.

New Year's Erev

2008-09-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

For those of my friends who are equinoctically inclined, I wish you a peaceful, sweet and joyful equinox. Wouldn't it be a lovely thing if the earth and the universe, and light and darkness could always achieve such perfect balance?

But speaking of light and darkness, that time of year approaches again, all sneaky and stealthlike and freaking out my friends in the clergy and even people like me, without official clerical responsibilities but a whole hell of a lot of cantorial soloist duties. As Tom Robbins once described it, the moon is currently rising like a bloated Elvis about to tip over from a surfeit of amphetamines and deep fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. That can only mean one thing: Rosh HaShanah is soon. Very soon. Some would almost say: too soon.

My dear friend and teacher Sandy says that no matter when they arrive, the Jewish holidays always take us by surprise. Even though I put in for my days off more than six months out, I'm always shocked when I look at the calendar and realize how much I have to do before I get out of here so I can leave with a clean slate, with the certainty that it'll be handled while I'm gone. And that hopefully, no one will call me from the office. But I do agree with Sandy: they're either too early (panic) or too late (total delusional oblivion, followed by panic) but never do they arrive like Goldilocks, at a time that's just right.

I spent a good two hours last week with Sandy, kibbitzing over turkey and pastrami sandwiches and going through the four services I will assist her with - erev Rosh HaShanah, Day 1, erev Yom Kippur and the Day Itself. She is an amazing and inspiring leader, one who knows her congregation and their needs. I'm always knocked out watching her, hoping that someday I can be as good at this job as she is. And I'm always touched, as we go through the melodies and responsive readings and liturgical cues, that she shares many of her memories of growing up in a liberal congregation: her family, the music, the recipes, the celebrations. Because I don't have those memories, it's always a learning experience for me. Generally, I don't know what happens in families on these holidays. Christmas and Easter I can help with, but the high holidays, not so much.

This is a year of transition for me - again. It seems like that's been the theme of the past several years. There has always been a major change on the horizon, whether it was going from mourner to a participant in life again, from sick to sicker and then, finally, to becoming healthier, from the Satanic boss in the not for profit dream job to the unexpected decency and humanity of my corporate colleagues. Even this year, there is still transition: from fighting against the limitations of illness to actually trying to do something about them.

I don't actually love New Year's. Not in the religious sense nor in the secular. The secular new year makes me nuts - I hate the false sense of celebrations, the ridiculous enforced sense of expectations, the stupidity of resolutions. The religious New Year is a little easier to swallow: at least no one is getting crap-sloppy drunk and acting like an ass for Dick Clark's rockin' cameras. Any new year freaks me out a bit, but I'm not as opposed to the reflection and introspection of the religious New Year, even though the notion of celebrating it without a family does make me feel a little alienated and excluded. But what can you do? Spend as much time as you can in your congregational community, seek out others who go it alone, and make the best of what you can. At least, that's the plan right now.

This past Shabbat my rabbi talked about how the New Year, how about bringing one's "first fruits" as an offering, wasn't merely about considering the past and how to make a better future, but also about acknowledging the importance of now. Not in a guilty or regretful way, but accepting where you are, and the beauty and sanctity you offer to the world on a daily basis.

That's my New Year's resolution for 5769. To hopefully offer beauty and sanctity every day - whether it's through teaching or working on a client project that may seem worthless on the surface, but might end up really helping someone. And also to accept that good change sometimes makes for difficult moments: like the fact that my 34 pound weight loss so adversely caused the steroid panic of last week (lower doses from now on, says my doctor). And vice versa: sometimes the worst change in the world can bring about good. Like if I can't get to school for whatever reason: economic, health insurance, crap Hebrew skills, whatever - if I don't go, it will be for a good reason. And it doesn't mean I can't do good without the title.

Like so many people looking inward for these last ten days, I'm trying to make a good end and a better beginning. Of course, as the joke goes, the best way to make the Holy One laugh is to tell Her your plans. Then again, I have wonderful, joyful, happy faith in my loony, imperfect, Law & Order-watching, moody diva beatlefan novelist, methotrexate-injecting, treif-consuming G-d. After all, it's all about being created b'tzelem Elohim, and if so, She's struggling to get better, too.

Don't need a sword to cut through flowers...

2008-09-19T19:40:00.000-07:00

I quit taking the steroids last night because believe it or not, I came to the conclusion that the physical pain was easier to deal with than the panic attacks. I did what I could: last night after blogging I took half an Ambien and ended up getting a decent night's sleep. At work today I felt another panic attack coming on, so I took half a xanax and warded it off. I hate that I'm fighting the side effects of one pill with several others, but as the late John Lennon wisely sang, whatever gets you through the night, it's alright.

Last week my therapist told me I should try to do some good things for myself, so I spent a whopping $146 today on two new dresses and two pairs of shoes to wear to services on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. True, I am focusing on exactly the wrong elements of Elul; I should be looking inward and repenting and reflecting, but for some odd reason I am looking outward at my appearance and trying to be a little more aware of bringing what beauty I have to the surface by dressing better, wearing makeup again, feeling more confident, making the most of what I have because it beats dwelling on the pain and the yuck and the sad.

Besides, on a practical level, I can't wear slacks for my cantorial soloist gig, and I do want to look somewhat pretty on the days of awe, even though I know I can't hold a candle to most of the women in my congregation. So I did some online shopping today and bought a chocolate-brown wrap dress (which I would love to pair with some high leather boots, but I'm thinking that's pretty much a bad scene for Yom Kippur morning) and a little black A-line dress with satin accents on the sleeves and hem. If it looks OK, I'll wear it for Kol Nidre. If it looks like crap, it goes right back to the fat chick store.

So today was a better day for a number of reasons: a decision to blow off a project until Monday (it'll keep), the retail therapy, a beautiful service this evening at temple...I do feel better, but I'm not there yet. I feel the pain creeping back in because the medicine is transitioning out, but I'll cross that bridge when I have to. In the meantime, I think sleep would help more than anything.

Shabbat shalom.

Flare

2008-09-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

It felt like a miracle this morning when I woke up: I could walk. This was not the case yesterday. When my clock radio went off, the pain was not only still there, it had intensified overnight, so that when my left foot hit the floor it felt like I'd been doing 85 MPH, Fred Flintstone-style, cross country. As if someone had dipped a fine gauge wire in gasoline, threaded it through my left leg, up to my lower back, and then set it on fire.

This is RA, folks. Unpredictable and excruciating. Most days, I'm not like this. But on the days I am, I have no idea how I'm going to get through it. I'm cranky, snappish, in a bad mood, because I can't even figure out how to walk the twenty steps from my office to the coffee machine or the manage two minute walk to my car from my apartment or get up the steps in my building -- I can't figure out how I'm going to get through the day without being in pain every single minute, pretty much unable to focus on anything else.

I limp from my apartment door to the elevator, ease myself down the steps one by one, holding on to the wall and the rails. I rest on the way to my car. When things get as bad as they were yesterday, I use the silver crutches that I keep in my bedroom closet. They help a lot. But when I'm like this, I can't get my own coffee. Or water. Or lunch. If I want to go to the ladies' room, I have to plan accordingly - devise the trip when hopefully no one will see me limping or using crutches, so I don't have to answer the questions, "What did you do to yourself? Are you OK?" or worse, have my colleagues look at me as if they know I'm not good enough or strong enough to be doing my job, that I'm unreliable, weak, and can't be trusted to handle my clients or projects.

Accordingly, I started the emergency Medrol pack. This is the only thing that helps me. Its side effects are legion. It drives blood sugar through the roof, and in my Type 2 diabetic current situation, I've got all the symptoms back - dry mouth, light-headedness, and the overwhelming need to consume, let's see: I'm on my fourth liter of water right now. The steroids also contribute to severe panic attacks like the one I had this morning, and the one I am trying to stave off right now by blogging, because hell knows, I won't be sleeping anytime soon. I can choose anything I'm anxious about: love, money, the novel I've written, Selichot, the friend I haven't seen in four weeks, my old job, the friend who got laid off this week (thanks, Lehman), my current job, the client who's pissing me off, the novel I haven't written, the friend I haven't seen in ten years, the focus group I have to pull out of my butt by tomorrow at 3PM, my retirement account, the High Holidays, the students I taught tonight who are struggling with family and religious and identity issues, the novel I want to write, the El Maleh Rachamim melody I have to learn by Yom Kippur - and the steroids help me to blow it up into another hurricane system sweeping the confines of my brain. And like Texas, New Orleans, etc., there's nothing I can do. Because the land itself cannot evacuate.

I know I'm sounding a little insane right now. That's okay: I'm feeling a little insane right now. So worried and yet, on Metro North earlier this evening, I know there are people with more worries than me. I know there are so many people struggling this week: afraid, with families, worried that it's all going to blow up in their faces, that their houses made of (credit) cards will fall. My company booked $156K of business this week: I do not have to worry like other people. My job is secure - more secure than it ever was in the Jewish world. I do good work and I try to do good works when I can. But I am so scared right now, scared that this pain situation is going to be forever and the only cure is driving me into this state of anxiety that's almost worse than being unable to function physically. What is the better trade-off?

Tonight as I was waiting for the train at Larchmont I was watching the headlights of the train move forward down the track - and almost so afraid to even admit this - I felt that I could understand the compulsion to jump on to the tracks. I would never do it, but I could understand the seduction of that moment, to be free of the worry and the anxiety, to be free of all this medication and these side effects, of these diseases and their dark roads forward. The endless hours of having to deal with meaningless tasks, the gym and the office and the constant wishing I was doing something that was life-affirming, that was helping someone, helping the world be better, instead of just being some stupid rat on a treadmill. But I stepped back from the yellow line, because if nothing else, Torah demands that I choose life. And being given the gift, the miracle of being able to walk this morning, was not meant for me to walk in that unspeakable direction.

In three weeks I have to chant my favorite words from the Torah...This mitzvah that I command you this day is not too distant, nor too difficult; it is not in the heavens nor across the seas, so that someone should bring it back to you so you can do it - no, it is very near to you, in your heart and in your mouth, and you can do it.

I know I can chant it. I just hope I can mean it.

Not Fade Away

2008-09-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

Many people far more articulate than I am have offered their reflections today, ranging from the world stage to the deeply personal, but as a witness to the events that took place seven years ago, I feel somewhat compelled to offer my own. It's an odd balance: it's a day when I appreciate being just another New Yorker who was downtown that morning, but it's also still true that the memory of that morning still exists in painful, singular detail; as universal and allegedly unifying as the day remains, it's also true everyone has their own experience of it. It's exactly the way one of my friends put it: the memory divides people into us and them - those who watched it go down in the safety of their homes and offices, and those of us who were right there, who had the story even before the networks did.

Like most people who were downtown that morning, I can recall, minute by minute, every step, every breath, every expression of disbelief: even the long, painfully endured vision of standing in my old conference room during those few minutes between the first plane and the second, when we still thought it was just a terrible accident. I was alone, staring out the window, my shock-addled brain bouncing from thought to thought: How will they ever fix the damage? There are people who are dying, right now, before my eyes. I am dreaming this. This isn't really happening.

I cried most of the way to work today, safe, in my basically armored vehicle, alone with my radio and my thoughts, alone with Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" and the moments of silence. My thoughts moved from that morning in the conference room to the moments of now: Abby lighting the yahrzeit candle in the Museum lobby, Audrey with her new baby, Connor in his 3rd grade classroom, Ellen still asleep in California. I wondered if there were any other people crying in their cars. I wondered if there were people crying on the subway and Metro North.

I no longer take the subway to work, no longer trace my steps downtown each morning with a sense of fear and dread, that today will be the day, that this train will be the one, that the guardsman standing in front of the florist in Grand Central can't really help if something goes wrong; that his job will be recovery, not rescue.

But there wasn't really any safety from today's sadness. This year it is hitting much harder for some reason that I can't quite figure out, nor do I have the energy to try. Even in Westchester, a place I consider inhabited mostly by "them" (those who watched it on TV), everywhere I've been today, I've heard and overheard conversations I didn't expect to hear: a woman's voice drifts out of her open car door, saying: "They didn't know I was alive. I tried and tried calling, but all the cell phones were down." Two colleagues smoking in front of our building's doors: "It wasn't like Mother Nature got angry. It wasn't an act of G-d." "3,000 people dead and we're no safer now than we were that morning. Probably less safe now, actually. What does it all mean? What was it all for?"

I thought about having a pumpernickel bagel for breakfast this morning. I happened to stop at Zaro's in Grand Central that morning for one, but they were all out. In a typical entitled New Yorker snit, I bitched out the girl behind the counter before settling for onion. A few weeks later, afflicted with the fever of kindness that had descended upon the city when I returned to work, I apologized. She looked at me like I had three heads. The onion one was still in its wax-paper wrapper on my desk when I got back to my office, covered in a fine layer of buttery grease and grayish dust.

I'm used to the skyline now. When I came back from Delaware this weekend I didn't feel the sadness and shock of not seeing the towers, all through college my first sign of home, the signal that I had only about 45 minutes to go before pulling in my driveway. For all the years of college and grad school they were the sign that I had escaped - from tough classes, from idiot boyfriends, from the fear that nothing was going the way it was supposed to; the skyline's message was that it didn't matter - I would be home soon, and someone would take care of me. But coming back this weekend, I realized that none of that is true anymore, so I just took the exit for the bridge and kept going.

And yet, for all of the painful memories of that morning, when I close my eyes I can still remember that summer Saturday in 1976, the ride into the city with the bicentennial star everywhere, even on the fire hydrants, and my dad's hand in mine as we stepped off the elevator and made our way through the glass doors to the rooftop, snaked with cables and wires and equipment, a place where most people weren't allowed to go, but where we had special access.

It was before I had ever been on an airplane, before I learned how to be afraid of heights. Together we walked the perimeter of the rooftop and looked all around, at the bridges strung across the East River, at the flat, industrial plain of New Jersey across the Hudson, at the companion rooftop of the south tower looming comfortingly close by.

My dad had just solved his first big case in the towers and I remember how the other officers greeted him like a hero. But more than that, I remember the city that he showed me that afternoon, as we looked from the top of the north tower and he pointed out landmarks and buildings and streets as if they were gifts he was giving to me, as if it was a kingdom that I would inherit, a place that would belong to me the way it belonged to him, someday.

The Elevatrix Files

2008-09-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

Upon my return from Delaware (where I had a really, really good time this weekend gallivanting around with my dear friends, none of whom look a day older than they did senior year), I arrived home to find that the elevator shaft in my building had flooded, the car itself was stuck in the basement (full of water, according to reports), so it wasn't merely the Delaware Valley that Hanna had her way with. For those of us who prefer to dwell on upper floors, it's been a bit of a tough week. Occasionally, a big rainstorm will knock out stuff in my apartment building, but four days later, we're still without an elevator, I've been schlepping up and down six flights of stairs a couple of times a day and my RA isn't liking it. Not one little bit.

My trusty handyman kindly informed me this morning that they expected it to be repaired sometime today - in fact he PROMISED me that we'd have a working elevator by the time I got home tonight. Not that I mind; I mean, sure, it's good exercise, and heaven knows I could use it. But when all is said and done I would really prefer not to have to do stairs. I don't hate stairs per se, but given my tendency to klutz myself on a consistent basis, and the fact that my flaring knees hate, HATE going downstairs (surprisingly, upstairs is a breeze in comparison), it's hard to remind myself that it's not laziness - it's actual pain that puts me in this position. Then again, it's not as bad as it could be - I am, in spite of all this RA crap, young and strong, and not a dog owner - so it's not as bad for me as it is for a lot of people in my building. I keep seeing friends and neighbors huffing up and down the stairs, all annoyed about the elevator, while their dogs (Coco and Biscuit and Callie) look as happy as anything. As much as I would love a happy little puppy in my life, it's a good thing I don't have one this week, since I would be totally screwed. And not in a good way.

Speaking of which, I have elected to forgo my dose of methotrexate this week, since I want to get back on a Monday schedule and last week's Wednesday shot played havoc with it. So I'm not nauseated so much this week, but for some reason, just tired as all hell. I've been going to bed at 9PM, sleeping straight through till 7AM. Again, not a bad thing - just unusual. Especially for this time of year, when I tend to feel more energized than normal.

I think a lot of the fatigue is more about this week than anything else. Seven years ago, that weekend in September of 2001, I also came home from a weekend in Delaware, after visiting the Brandywine Arts Festival (which was rained out this past weekend) and I remember very clearly being there, coming home and really trying to make sense of the direction my life was taking at the time. I actually had a doctor's appointment on the night of Monday the 10th, and I remember telling my doctor that I was really stressed out, and anxious, and wasn't feeling like I was handling things well, because I didn't have a whole lot to be stressed about.

Of course, that all changed the next morning.

But more on that tomorrow.

In the meantime, hopefully things will be looking up (or at least going up) when I get home tonight.

Major Deegan FAIL

2008-09-05T14:16:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it's spaz week in Andi-land. Yesterday, I caught my shoe heel in the hem of my trousers and succeeded in launching myself down a flight of steps, ultimately landing in an Olympic-style ass-plant at the bottom. In front of my boss. Fortunately, I only sustained a slight injury to my left knee. Oh, and my dignity.

Then today, on the way back from a client meeting, my car got rear-ended on the Major Deegan, and not in a good way. Fortunately, my Infiniti is a big heavy car with a big heavy bumper, so it only ended up with a couple of scratches. But it wasn't a jolt that my already injured, rheumatically-challenged body really needed. I just hope I can get out of bed tomorrow.

Thankfully, I am on my way south tonight, to Delaware, ostensibly to attend the Brandywine Arts Festival but really to hang out with my college buddies / sorority sisters / partners in crime, etc. I'm leaving tonight so as to not have any unfortunate encounters with Hanna; given my mojo this week, it seems like a good idea to avoid as much trouble as possible.

Back to posting on Monday. Shabbat shalom, y'all.

Methotrexate, mon amour

2008-09-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

I guess the only good thing about having survived bad relationships is that ultimately, it teaches you how to deal with taking medication, especially when it's a medication that's almost as bad as the illness itself. I've been in too many relationships like that, heaven knows, where living with love and its consequences is almost as difficult as feeling like you're all alone.

And so it is with methotrexate, the weekly wonder shot, the yellow syringe of doom, the drug my insurance company won't pay for me to self-inject, which has enabled me to get to know every one of the doctors in my medical group, many of whom have now experienced the joy of asking me to expose my tushy to the slings and arrows of rheumatoid fortune.

I'm rhapsodizing a bit because today is bad. Labor Day, and yesterday's doctor's appointment, afforded me a little delay this week. Obviously couldn't get the shot on a holiday, and my insurance company in their infinite wisdom, won't allow me to see two doctors in one day. So at 7:45 this morning, I presented butt to the covering physician (my regularly scheduled doc is on vacation) and let the Rear Admiral do the honors. I was fine for about two hours, and then it hit. Stomach upset, throwing up, fatigue, the dizzies...it's just not a good day.

That's a reason why this is sort of like being in a lousy relationship. You hate it, you wish you could find another option, but ultimately, when it's not being a total pain in the ass, it makes you feel a little bit better about your existence. It even, on occasion, succeeds in taking some of the pain away.

And then just when you think you're feeling better, and that maybe you can live with things the way they are, you find yourself head down in the toilet again.

Ugh. I'm off to get a diet cream soda out of the fridge, the best sugar-free low carb cure for nausea that I know of. Any other remedies you can recommend, please let me know.

Freestyle

2008-09-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, it wasn't all good news at the diabetes doctor today. Today was our first consultation - she's wonderful. Sweet, kind, smart, and clearly looking at all the factors - genetic, medication, and lifestyle. She acknowledged right away the issues at hand: being double-whammied genetically from both sides of the family is a huge thing to fight right out of the gate. The good news is that I've pretty much got the lifestyle piece down: I'm down another seven pounds since my last doctor's appointment, and once I really start exercising, I'll have made most of the changes I need to make. Losing sugar and switching to mostly whole grains has already made a big difference.

The bad news is that my RA medication is likely playing a major role in this whole nonsense: the steroids, apparently, do more than just lessen inflammation and make me feel better. They also send my sugar values through the roof. For example: I'm on a steroid pack at the moment, and my blood sugar was 253 fasting. Not a good number.

So I got a new toy as a result - the lovely Freestyle Lite test meter (pictured above), which I am supposed to use faithfully once a day (just once - thank heavens) to see where my blood sugar is at. I also got a new medicine which is not only supposed to help lower it, it also helps with weight loss. (Me: "Can I start it now? Do you have any here?") The nurse trained me on how to test, and it's not too bad - it doesn't hurt or anything, but I am really disappointed that I have to take all these steps to make sure it's under control. Apparently, with the three strikes of genetics, RA meds and not-quite-being-svelte yet, I've got some work to do. And it will be safer and healthier work if I am aware of what's going on sugar-wise.

I have to say I do like the name Freestyle. Kind of a Michael Phelps-ian, Californian eclectic sound to it. I figured I'd end up with the Aviva, given that it's my name, but maybe that's not such a bad thing. I mean, how closely does one need to identify with their testing supplies? Ah, marketing.

Be Sure to Wear a Flower in Your Hair, or Ten Things I Learned on My Summer Vacation

2008-08-31T12:34:00.001-07:00

Shalom, hello, boom-shan-ka (young ones fans will get that reference) - I'm back from vacation and probably more relaxed than I've been for the past fifteen, twenty years. This is, of course, thanks to my dear friend Ellen, best buddy since 1978 and the person to whom I owe surviving the years between eight and sixteen relatively unscathed.

Nothern California, specifically Marin County, where we were headquartered, is beautiful - surrounded by mountains and close to the ocean and everything that someone who desperately needed to reconnect with nature could have wanted. So what did we do on our summer vacation? Hung out, watched The Young Ones, listened to the Beatles, looked for shells on a pretty beach by the Pacific Ocean, drank sugar-free lattes, cooked lots of yummy vegetarian dishes, and went to the place I've been waiting to see for thirty-eight years: the most famous streetcorner in the world:

Of course, I'd been to SF before, but my parents (with whom I traveled both times) didn't really feel like indulging my late 20th century hippie sensibility, so we skipped the Haight last time. But we didn't skip it this time, and it was great. Touristy, sure, and certainly there isn't much left over from the summer of love. But the vibe was there, and so was the contact high, for sure.

The main thing, however, is knowing that I was in pretty desperate need of a perspective change, it actually happened. I wasn't expecting it, but luckily, just being in a different place, with a much more mellow attitude and away from all of the limits and barriers and stupid stuff that shrinks your world down to the size of your desk and your dashboard and your cell phone - I was really able to forget about much of the stupidity going on at home, and feel less stressed about the need to change everything right this second.

So without further ado, here are the ten things I learned on my summer vacation. As a tribute to my friendship with Ellen, titles, in all cases, are taken from Beatles songs:

10. I was alone, I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there: But what I did find was that first and foremost, I am wound WAY too tight. (Ellen: "You're just realizing this?") But it's true. Whether this has been caused by the crapalicious events of the past three years just isn't relevant. What I found out I need is to relax, to laugh, to remember who I am, to be happy - by whatever means necessary.

9. Well, well, well, you're feeling fine: My doctors are not always right. Laying awake one night, very late, after watching Vyv and Neil battle it out on University Challenge, I realized how long it had been since I'd really laughed, really felt like things were going to be OK. And that perhaps the RA and the diabetes and all the other crap I've been dealing with were just symptoms of a broken heart. Not that it would be surprising - there's been a lot of heartbreak in the past few years. But I don't have to keep testing the cracks to see if it's still broken - maybe it's time to let it heal.

8. And I'm not what I appear to be: My doctors are not always wrong. I've got more to deal with than the average bear, and even if the root cause of it all is a broken heart, the symptoms of the other stuff are still there and need to be dealt with in a healthy and constructive way. For the past few years I've been using a lot of energy to cover over when I'm not feeling well, and doing a lot of pretending that I'm not in pain a good deal of the time. It takes more energy and strength than I realized to pretend. Maybe I'd feel stronger if I didn't spend so much time lying about it - who's it really helping, anyway?

7. There are places I remember, all my life, though some have changed: Bowling alleys may come and go (and there aren't any in Marin County, just like there aren't any in Eastchester anymore) but some friendships are forever. Long, long ago, Ellen and I were publishing hand-drawn copies of the Eastchester Times - our newspaper chronicling the annals of guido culture in our hometown - including the destruction of guido hangout Waverly Lanes, replaced with a CVS in 1985. Though so much stuff is lost in time, there is nothing like a friend who can help you make sense of the past, who shares memories of people and things that aren't here anymore. I only realized a few short weeks ago that carrying around grief keeps people and things alive, but now I know friends do too. And laughter is much lighter.

6. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream: Ideas and activities once indulged in as a teenager are still good for a heck of a laugh now. Thanks, George.

5. No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low: I never saw more beautiful trees than in CA, especially Ellen's most gorgeous Tree of Life pendant - how wonderful is it to have friends with talent? But while I was out there I was kind of able to renew my sense that in spite of recent events, my call to Judaism is just fine. In my head as I was traveling I was comparing NY trees to CA trees and then realized it doesn't matter - people are going to disagree that their tree is the one, but as a leader I only have to remember one thing; it is a tree of life to those who hold it fast and all who cling to it find happiness. Its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace.

4. Hey, you've got to hide your love away: Really wasn't such good advice.

3. Keeping an eye on the world going by my window: After seven years (almost to the day) of being very fearful, and even though I'm not sure of being really safe even with taking off shoes in the security line, I'm happy to report that I'm no longer afraid to fly.

2. Show me that I'm everywhere and get me home for tea: A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Stage Deli in NYC, gazing across the street at a dive bar called the Irish Pub. Why? Because eleven years ago, on that very corner, I was laughing with someone I loved at the time. And walking along the streets of the Haight, I hoped that somehow, I'd leave a happy memory there that I would be able to come back and visit someday. I hope that somehow it works out, and that maybe even no matter where you are, somewhere in time, you're still there.

1. You can learn how to be you in time; it's easy - all you need is love: (Ellen: "You knew that already.") Yes, I do know this already, but as I'm sure many people would agree, it's easy to forget. But maybe now it will be easier to be grateful for the love and laughter already in my life, and hopefully having rediscovered it on the west coast, I can hold on to it here, back east.

Having come back home, I'm hoping to hold on to some of these lessons. What struck me the most about the trip, and especially about the photos we took, is how happy and healthy I look - for the first time in years. I don't think that's something that NY can take away (at least I hope not) but I think the narrowness of life, how easily one can let it shrink down to emails and daily demands and expectations, can quickly erode inner peace.

But as the song says: the willow turns his back on inclement weather. And if he can do it, we can do it...with a little luck.

Happy Fever-sary!

2008-08-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

It's official: as of today, I've had a fever for two years. After a battery of tests, having drunk gallons of radioactive crap (to see if any naughty cells light up under the MRI), and after consulting with at least seven physicians, the conclusion is that the fevers are "rheumatoid in nature." As in rheumatic fever, a 19th century, Jacob Riis meets Jane Austen type of disease. I don't even have a chaise longue to go with it, nor am I inclined to take the cure at the seaside. I suppose the vapors are next. Or possibly some scurvy?

Strangely enough, I've got this weird urge to celebrate this nonsense - I mean, hell, if you've gotta be sick, you may as well have fun with it. So this morning, I took it upon myself to look at that quaint old list of anniversary presents. Number two (heh heh, you said, "number two") doesn't get you anything too glam. Research tells me that the traditional gift for a second anniversary is cotton (?); the modern gift is china (supposing, I guess, that you've managed to break some of the china that you received as a present the first time around). But cotton? Not sure what to do with this.

So...tomorrow I am off to California for a few days of relaxation, ocean-gazing and Young Ones videos with my dear friend Ellen and her family. The car service will be arriving at some insane hour tomorrow morning (yes, it'll still be dark out), so there's much to do today to get ready. Being ridiculously organized (it's a curse, believe me) I made a list, checked it twice, and I'm already sitting here stressing about the decision to check my wheelie bag or not. And of course, stressing about whether said car service will even be able to find my apartment, given my mystery address. If my friends have trouble finding me, I don't have a whole lot of faith in a stranger in a Town Car.

And of course there's the garden-variety flight anxiety that afflicts me every time I board one of these winged creatures. The iPod is queued up, the xanax is in my purse, but I can't shake the scary realization that I booked: A nonstop flight. To California. On a Tuesday morning. On what is supposed to be a beautiful sunny day. I realize very few people remember those details, but sometimes it's the little things you can't shake that come back to haunt you.

I'm going to comfort myself with a toasted bialy now. Tell me I'm being paranoid.

love, love, love...ALR

Counting Down

2008-08-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

My apologies, again, it's been a while; my head just has not been clear enough or relaxed enough to get an idea down on virtual paper. Between the swampitude at work (haven't been this busy in some time) and the NBC-sponsored, Phelpsian fog of worship that has clouded my at-home hours for the past ten days or so, my fingers haven't exactly been on speaking terms with the keyboard lately.

Hopefully, that is all about to change. Realizing I am in desperate need of a perspective shift, some calmness that is neither vicodin-induced nor pedicure-inspired, and just a general need to get the hell out of Dodge before the annual September 11th Memorial Week to Ten Days of Severe Panic Attacks sets in, I am headed to California, (aching in heart, optional.)

Six more days, and I'll be off to San Francisco for a few days of relaxation, and hopefully some wine, since my dear friend Ellen lives in Marin, not far from a whole slew of wineries, vineyards, etc. I'd be happy with plain ol' grapes, (p'ri hagafen, baby!) but I could also be very happy bringing back a bottle (or case) given all the blessing we're going to be doing in late September and October.

My rheumatologist says that I shouldn't have any wine, but also acknowledges that I probably won't listen to her. Normally I am quite cheerful and obedient in these sorts of situations, then again, I was a very happy beaujolais drinker during my four days in Paris last year, so she's right: I'll probably do some damage out there.

I have only two requests, and those are 1) to go see Copia, the museum of food, wine and the arts and 2) to see the Pacific Ocean. If you've ever sailed in the Pacific, you already know it is totally misnamed. Eight years ago, I spent vacation on a 35 foot Catalina named Moonshadow, off the coast of Washington State tooling around the San Juan Islands.

My first day out showed that the Pacific is, shall we say, kind of demanding.

Imagine this: 40 foot swells leaving port, water coming up on deck, trying to raise the sails in gale force winds, and a mentally unbalanced, somewhat masculine sailing instructor yelling "Sailing is not for the WEAK!" over the wail of the wind and my fellow sailing students doing our best not to barf up a lung or two. Thus, I'd like to leave this time with a different take on my darling Atlantic's westerly sister. Like, not throwing up, or coming home more agitated and shaken up than I'd been before I left.

Hence the need for a more relaxing vacation, this time around.

I'll try to post again before I go.

RIP, Isaac Hayes

2008-08-10T21:19:00.001-07:00

Yahrzeit

2008-08-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long hiatus, friends, and for those certain ones who have been emailing, concerned that I went down for the count again and was possibly hospitalized or seizuring or three-days-dead in my apartment, I really appreciate that you were looking for me. But it was a tumultuous week or two, and for a time, I couldn't even find the words to describe it.

It all started when I agreed to co-lead a Friday night Shabbat service on August 1. Yes, I know, many of you didn't realize this was happening, but I'll get to that in a moment. Normally, when I prep to lead a service, it takes a good month or so for me to get my thoughts in order, study the Torah portion with my co-leader, choose the music with some modicum of sensitivity to the larger Jewish calendar (i.e., if you're in a mourning period like we are now, don't pick the up-tempo stuff), and also, try to inject some semblance of creativity into the process - since summer is the time to play a little bit. Summer is great for this sort of thing - not only are you dealing with lay-leaders, but you have some latitude to be creative, try a new reading, or a poem, or a song that other people might not know, but might also come to appreciate.

Anyway...my co-leader was, shall we say, not exactly open to new ideas. And that's fine; I get it. She's a very smart, interesting, good person, but school has given her a strong sense that there are right and wrong ways of leading a service. And we've both been informed by habit: I'm used to the customs at my synagogue, and she's used to the customs she learned living in Israel and then being part of an intensive academic community where the students' ideas and innovations are always subject to judgement.

This combination of my free-spiritedness and her way-more-learnedness-than-me led to some pretty brutal conflict. Over a Shabbat service. Seriously. Not what I ever imagined myself fighting over. And let me tell you, the side effects were nasty.

All of this began because of the fact that we were due to co-lead an afternoon Shabbat service the same day in a local nursing home. She took offense at something I said, which was literally so innocuous that I still can't figure out what happened - but she perceived me as trying to "take over" and "push her out of the way" - at a nursing home??? What would that even mean? Why would anyone waste their time? It's not Emanu-El, people.

Luckily, the universe intervened and took me out of that scenario. But the damage was done for Friday night. Here's how it went down:

The week before the service, I suggested sending an evite for Fri night. Given that most of MY friends don't actually belong to our congregation, they had no other way of finding out about the service. This was dismissed as a cheesy marketing maneuver (sorry about my profession, but, whatever) - which was altogether tacky and inappropriate for a synagogue setting. Never mind that for every previous service I've done, I've sent one out. So, feeling stupid, I didn't send it. Which meant that I now didn't even feel comfortable sending an email to let my friends know it was coming up. I was hurt and embarrassed, so I invited no one.

Then I wanted to read a poem about peace in Israel that challenged the notion of G-d's role in the conflict between religions in the Holy Land. What I didn't expect was her reaction that was so completely offended that I would be called upon, in the middle of a workday, to defend my "faulty" theological viewpoint. On the phone. Before a meeting. Luckily, it was all summarily dismissed, since she decided that because I had never lived in Jerusalem, I didn't understand anything about G-d's presence there, and thus had no right to comment.

The next day, she called to say that she had been rethinking the evite: since, in her words, it must be very hard for me because unlike her, I do not have a Jewish family to support me. Her husband and parents and children would be there for her, she said, so she felt sorry for me and understood if I felt I needed to invite people, you know, since nobody from my family would be there. So, as if I wasn't feeling bad enough...now it was in my face that since I am a convert, I was someone to be pitied. The sages say that born Jews should never make a convert feel uncomfortable, should never remind people who choose Judaism that they are different - those sages knew something about good taste and tact. And so, in my congregation, I had never felt like a shamed convert, until that moment.

(Actually, my mom WAS planning to come, but after I told her about that last comment, she was so angry that I thought it would be better if she stayed home - she shouldn't get herself all worked up just because someone made a snotty comment about our family. My mom's reaction? "I'll show her the REAL meaning of a Jewish mother."

I'm all for revenge, but not in the sanctuary. Talk about inappropriate.)

Things went downhill pretty rapidly at that point. We met for a rehearsal two nights before the service, and after being told that A) my closing song was, again, inappropriate; B) the new piece of liturgical song I wanted to do didn't sound "ready" and C) that I needed to learn the difference between what was appropriate for a synagogue and what wasn't -- I just freaking lost it. It was a meltdown of epic proportions. We had to stop the rehearsal - I literally could not go on. I haven't cried so much in that sanctuary since my dad's first yahrzeit.

Sadly, I still couldn't find the words to defend myself.

But all was not hopeless. Friends, alerted to the situation, helped with the music. Family rallied and offered support. And other friends called and listened and offered advice and consolation and pure love. It helped a lot. Because the other thing I didn't mention is that this was all happening at a splendid, perfect time. The night of the rehearsal - the night I was crying so much - was actually the anniversary - the yahrzeit - of my being date-raped, 21 years ago. So - essentially - it wasn't a good time to be made to feel even more vulnerable than I was feeling. And it certainly wasn't a time to go kicking at the tires of my identity (Judaism, family, future spiritual leadership) to see if there were any soft spots.

The clincher came on Thursday night. She called to say she had been really upset about the meltdown, and she thought she understood why I was crying. She said she knew how hard it must be for me to be single, to be viewed by the congregation as being somehow incomplete, defective, unlike everyone else. And how resentful I must be of everyone who has a Jewish family and a husband and a real life.

At this point: whatever. How much more can you cry before it becomes laughable? And how can you prove to someone who thinks like that that you are actually pretty much OK with the life choices you've made?

End result: the service went pretty well. We managed to pull it off, tried to resolve our differences, and realized that when all was said and done, our communications styles just weren't compatible. (To say the absolute least.) I still don't exactly know what happened; I'm still shaky and sad and a little freaked out that someone in my community had such a hard time with me, to the point that she had to challenge me, not only on my theology and ideas, but on my family, identity, and future as well.

For now, it feels like I need a break from temple; I need my Friday nights, my Shabbats, for myself - not for her, not for them, not for the community that I love - but now the community that I have to wonder about - if it perceives me the way she does. She now wants to get together to "process" what went wrong, but I'm not ready yet. I have a feeling I will end up feeling just as stupid and damaged and vulnerable as I did for all the years when I blamed myself for what happened 21 years ago. It's not a good feeling, and it's sadly familiar to me.

Even when I take a step back, and I realize that all this was, ultimately, was a single Friday night, a night when a ton of people were out of town, and that no one who was present will remember it, I'm not consoled. Perhaps it is because it all is part of that Friday night all those years ago, when someone's parents were out of town, and that no one else who was there, at that party, even remembers it - even though that is where the whole story of the end of my world began. It's still there, after all this time -- and this week, it was like someone pushed the buttons on the time machine and sent me back.

When the Twin Towers came down, I remember asking myself that day, I wonder if there will ever come a time when I will realize that this was only about two buildings that were destroyed. In the scheme of larger things, like the Holocaust, this is barely a single heartbeat. But for some people the world ended that day, and I understand why. Something about this service - this yahrzeit - feels like it ended a world for me as well. Or at the very least, it was like another little world that I never want to go back to, ever again.

And that brings into question the whole decision about going to rabbinical school. Because it makes me wonder if this is what it is going to be like - getting smacked down, told off, and made to feel like my Judaism is inauthentic.

But that, fortunately, is another post for another day.

Sick, Sicker, Dying, Dead

2008-07-25T20:58:00.000-07:00

Damn it all to hell, I'm sick again. Or perhaps should I say, I'm still sick. I knew it was coming on yesterday, when I spent most of the day sweating my way through the Flatiron district. I had a client meeting that went really well, but I just couldn't find any energy to enjoy it. It was just hot, and sticky and uncomfortable, and my nose is stuffy so I can't breathe, and my chest hurts from coughing, and I'm dizzy from being congested, and generally miserable.

So I stayed home from work today and slept til 11AM. I thought about going in, but there wasn't anything I couldn't handle on email, so I worked from home.

Unfortunately, I had made a commitment to help out some friends at their Shabbat service tonight - and unable to find a sub, I went, sat in the back row, and was alternately chilled and sweating and coughing and sniffling, mostly unable to follow along and not really aware of my surroundings. Thankfully, it was a short service, so I got the song sung and got the hell out of Dodge. I'm sure I sounded like a wino attempting the Springsteen catalog after a tough night, but it's over, and now I can sleep.

Since I'm not sure I am going to do any posting this weekend - seriously! I need to rest! - I leave you with this troubling exchange over the subject of POTATO SALAD between a food blogger and the "publicity manager" for America's Test Kitchen, which was, up until I read this blog post, one of my favorite cooking shows. Being in the PR biz, I can't comprehend even participating in an email exchange like this, telling people that they can't post a recipe with their own modifications because theirs is Just So Perfect. I don't think you can legally copyright a list of ingredients, either. My agent, the master of all food-related/recipe knowledge, would know. I will ask her next time we chat.

Besides, is there any such thing as a "perfect" recipe? Generations of cooks in my own family, all of whom have modified our classic Sunday gravy over the years (my own addition is grated carrot, sauteed in butter to caramelize the sugars) would beg to differ.

Shabbat shalom, mes chers amis.

Laughter at Sinai

2008-07-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

At my workplace, summer is a time for relaxation. This is not to say that we're not busy; considering how lousy the economy is, business here is surprisingly booming. My company (or I should say the company for which I have oversight) is doing especially well. Westchester is just beginning to catch on to the importance of brand management and website marketing, and as a result, I suddenly have more work than I can handle. Nonetheless, as a team we are encouraged to make the most of the "slow" months because the fall and winter tend to be insane. And they are. For about three weeks in October, we are slammed with events and conferences every day. And that's in addition to the regular workload.

But today was a good day, the perfect day to get away for a couple of hours. I had lunch with a dear friend who is a terrific Jewish leader in her own right - an inspiration on so many levels - and it's great to catch up with her and hear all about what it's like to lead a congregation in real life. From what I can gather, considering the many, many friends that I am so fortunate to have in my life, who have transitioned from secular life into seminary and then into congregational life, it's a lot closer to Moses' struggle to lead B'nai Yisrael through the wilderness than they would have imagined.

Catching up today really helped to put things in perspective. There are some days that I see or speak with old friends, or reconnect on Facebook, and sometimes when people ask how I've been, I wonder how much I can really tell them. The last thing I want to do is sound like a downer, but it's harder than you might expect to focus on the good (novel, school, landing on my feet in a sane job) when the bad has so much more power over me, still. More times than I can count, I have watched as horrified eyes look back at me as I describe my life over the last three years. More than once I've been asked how it is that I'm even able to talk about it.

Last night, as I was driving up to Connecticut to spend the night at my sister's, my best friend called and out of nowhere, I confessed that I had spent a good part of the day in tears. In fact, even as I was driving up I684, I was still crying. I knew what it was about. I've been thinking a lot about my dad, thinking a lot about the sheer ridiculous injustice of being sick, and knowing that I am still sick because a certain person took it upon herself to do what she could to ruin my health. What makes me even angrier is that two years after the fact, I am still dealing with the consequences. I felt like I was crying out of sheer frustration that I had made the mistake of allowing it to happen in the first place, because at some level, I feel like I must have chosen this. And if I did, then how stupid am I?

My friend understood and made the point that I was probably crying now because I couldn't cry then. Because I was too busy fighting for my sanity to actually take the time to be sad about what I was trying to survive.

I think everyone gets something like this in their life, something or someone who is just simply so unbelievably sad and sick and destructive that it takes a long time to heal from the damage, and an even longer time to let go of the anger. But eventually you have to let go or you are in danger of becoming obsessed to the point of losing yourself because you might actually succumb to the power of the thing you hate. Eventually, you have to move on.

Today I heard some really good advice about how to interpret the unexpected symbols and signs that get sent to you, sometimes at the most inconvenient moments. It reminded me of the first festival service I attended after losing my dad, which was Shavuot, commemorating the giving of the Torah at Sinai. I remember showing up for services that evening, knowing that it would also be the first Yizkor service that I would officially be a mourner.

Needless to say, I was dreading it. I'd seen enough friends - not to mention leaders and congregants that I liked and respected -- fall so completely to pieces during Yizkor that I knew I was in trouble. And at that time, the grief was so real and raw that I was positive I would pretty much lose it. Which wasn't a good thing: I was sitting up front in the sanctuary, with the choir, and the last thing I wanted to do was make a spectacle of myself.

That night, the service dragged on - all I could do was wait for the moment. I remember the tension in my body, literally feeling as if I was trying to hold myself together. I was so full of darkness, trying so hard to prepare for the emotional storm to come. And finally it did. The memorial service began with these sad, graceful meditations all about loss, the mournful melodies started up, and finally, the cantor sang the memorial prayer - El Maleh Rachamim - with such emotion that I felt my eyes start to hurt from the effort of holding back my tears.

We paused for a moment of silent reflection. I bit my lip, felt a trembling in my throat, was about to reach for a Kleenex, when suddenly, someone totally cut one. Not a hugely loud one, but as they say: out of the silence, a still, small voice.

The next thing I knew was that there I was, half a second ago trying not to cry, and now I was desperately trying not to laugh. And all I could think about was yeah, dairy's a tradition for this festival...but now I'd never be able to get through another Shavuot without being reminded of how someone cut the cheese.

So what did I learn today? In sharing that story, I realized that maybe it's been a bad time, and maybe I do have things to cry about. On the other hand, telling myself to be sad, and that I have many things to be miserable about, etc. may not be the answer either. Seriously. Because you never know when - or how - the message that changes your perspective will reach you.

On some days, wisdom emerges from the voices of the people who love you. At Sinai, it was a voice that spoke in thunder and the blare of the shofar that delivered wisdom to a people in need of direction. And even as I am still learning from the moment, on that Shavuot, it was a different trumpet blast, entirely.

Home, Not Home

2008-07-22T13:33:00.000-07:00

This morning I had a great view of my apartment building from the coffee place across the street. The lush, leafy treetops looked so pretty against the red brick and white trim. Even the shape of the building looked lovely, the way the sun and shadow played off one another and the angles of the structure. Then the question occurred to me: why do I hate living there?

So far, of all the places I've lived - and it's not that many - this is the one that feels the least like home. It's not that I don't like it, it's that there's so little to like about it. There's a lot of room, almost 800 square feet - but it feels like a big box. It's got some nice architectural details, like an arched doorway and a black and white checkered kitchen floor, but there's no real charm. It's on the sixth floor, but it gets ridiculously hot. And overall, I just don't feel at home there. I don't know if I ever did.

I think it's got something to do with the fact that so much bad stuff has happened since I moved there in 2004. Of course, I was pretty much driven out of my old apartment (see photo above) - which was small and charming and funky - and overrun with mice as the result of a new construction going up next door. Bad me: I took the first apartment I found, because I was tired of seeing Mickey and Jerry and Minute and all those other rodents brazenly occupying my living space. And of course, I thought I'd only be there for a year at the most. At the time, I was supposed to get married and move the hell out of New York.

But things didn't exactly turn out that way. From the beginning, a lot went wrong. When my boyfriend at the time was supposed to help me organize the painting before I moved in, he managed to screw up the job in about seventeen places before giving up entirely and decamping to his mother's house. In rapid succession, I picked out the wrong drapes, the wrong rug, and the wrong color for the living room. It wasn't pretty - I could even say I hated it - but having signed the lease, I put up a mezuzah and hoped for the best.

Needless to say, I didn't end up moving. In some ways it was for the best, but it left me stuck in this space that I never really loved in the first place, surrounded by stuff that made me feel as if I was stuck in time. This was not without a certain logic. The rug - oy, that rug - was a black and gray and gold monstrosity that would have looked better in some stoner's basement rec room than underneath my new dining room set from Fortunoff. The evening it arrived, my dad came over to help me put it down. I could tell he was a little annoyed at coming over so late, but he did nonetheless. My sister's father in law had just died of cancer a couple of weeks earlier, and I could tell that it had really freaked my dad out. We sat on my new sofa and chatted for a while after arranging the rug under the table and chairs. "You know, Ann," he said, "it's a little scary when suddenly it's your peers you see going. It makes you feel that you don't have much time left." I remember trying to reassure him that he was absolutely healthy, and that he had all the time in the world. But he was right; he didn't. That was the last time he ever was in my apartment. He died less than a month later.

For years, I kept that rug. I just couldn't find the courage or the strength to get rid of it. Even though it was ugly as sin, and dark, and sucked all the light out of the room. It was the last thing that tied him to my life there. I knew he would never see the next home I moved into.

Finally, my best friend Meg, who is an interior designer, came over one afternoon a couple of months ago and just started getting rid of stuff. Fortunately, she wouldn't take no for an answer, and the rug went down to the basement, where someone in the building promptly dumpster dived it. Upstairs, the room was suddenly that much bigger, filled with that much more light.

In the intervening years, that apartment has borne witness to a lot of tough days. Three nights of shivah. Endless evenings spent editing my manuscript. The end of an engagement; the continuation of the relationship that ended the engagement; friends with benefits; breakups and heartbreaks and outright lies. Too many holidays spent slaving over marketing plans while the rest of the world celebrated with fireworks and cookouts and family time. Hours on the phone with friends talking about the outright betrayal and ingrained cultural malice of a former workplace. And then the three months it stood empty while I moved back home to take twice daily IV treatments, because I wasn't able to take care of myself.

Even now, I don't love being home. I can always find something to distress me about being there. I've got persistent moths that come to visit every so often (the fact that they destroy the carbs in my cupboard is now not the worst thing in the world); a squirrel that likes to break in via the air conditioner, and just a general feeling of unease, waiting for another shoe to drop. Or even another pair of shoes, at the rate things have gone.

This November will mark four years, with one year left on my latest lease. I'm hoping by the time '09 rolls around, that maybe I'll have the energy to move. Or at the very least, that somehow, I'll have found a way to make my house a home sweet home - even if it is, like everything else these days, artificially sweetened.

A Hard Yom's Laila

2008-07-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of trying to do things that I really enjoy on Shabbat - other than studying in the morning, napping in the afternoon, and treating myself to the occasional Treif McMuffin every once in a while, yesterday I had the great pleasure of seeing A Hard Day's Night on the big screen at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, one of my favorite destinations in beautiful Westchester County, NY.

It amazes me; after 44 years, the film was as fresh and vibrant as it must have seemed in 1964. Not that I would know, considering that I was born two weeks after the Beatles broke up. But The Long and Winding Road was number one on the Billboard charts, so I like to think that maybe that means I didn't miss the era entirely.

I do have to say that as much as I like the digital remastering of the songs, I really miss the old imperfections that I remember hearing on my old records (anyone here remember records?) and on AM radio during the 70s. For instance, on the original track of If I Fell, Paul McCartney totally chokes on the high note of the bridge (and I/would be sad if our new love/was in vain). Now that the digital recordings have replaced the old soundtrack, all of the old edges have been smoothed over; the clarity is as pristine and professional as if it had been recorded a year ago, instead of nearly fifty.

Which is kind of sad in a way. True, everyone indulges in their own revisionist history - heaven knows the Beatles are as guilty of that as any rock group that has survived into the digital age; since we have the technology to cover it up, smooth it out, hide it from view, so many people want their legend to be without blemish. But very often, it's our mistakes that give us character, and bring a sense of the unique to an otherwise bland vanilla treadmill of a song, or even a life.

I once knew someone who was so terrified of anyone seeing her mistakes that it cost her everything - her marriage, her relationships with her kids (whom she bullied to the point where they clearly couldn't make any decisions for themselves); her social life (of which she had none because she was always too busy staying late at work to cover her ass and give people the impression that she was working, when she wasn't, not in real life), and even her sense of personal security - so much so that the only delight left in her life was making sure other people took the fall for all the things she did wrong. And that person did a lot of wrong - not just in terms of making bad professional decisions, but just not being able to focus long enough to learn new skills or technologies. This, in essence, led to the fact that most of the time, she had no idea what the heck she was doing - which in turn led her to falsify documents and cheat her staffers and spin every mistake she made into either someone else's fault, or into an outright lie.

I think about that flubbed note in If I Fell and I can't help but be reminded of the time I spent observing this person and her fear; the insecurity that governed everything she did, said and acted on, no matter who it hurt and no matter what the consequences. As if the worst thing that would happen is that she would be wrong. Instead of doing wrong - which was undoubtedly the greater of two evils.

So I was sitting in the theater, thinking about how grateful I felt to simply have the free time to sit in a theater and see a movie instead of constantly having to answer a cell phone or an email and react and respond to the crisis situations that her insecurity always created, no matter whether it was Shabbat, or midnight, or even during my vacation time. Then something happened just before the film started: a group of about eight people rushed into the theater and took up the seats all around me. As it turned out, they were Israeli, so I had the great pleasure of listening to commentary about the movie and about the Beatles, all in Hebrew. Which was strange, and cool, and sad and beautiful all at the same time. It was the coming together of two lives - the life I had before and the one I live now. Because I think of the Beatles, very often, as something that belongs to a past life, the one before lots of bad things started happening. After 9/11, I couldn't listen to their music for months - none of it made sense to me anymore. And after my dad died, the only song I could bear to hear was The Ballad of John and Yoko. Why? Because only two Beatles (John and Paul) recorded it. To me it represented something that appeared to be whole on the surface, but once you looked really close (or listened), you knew that something that was once whole was broken, and somehow incomplete.

Watching my heroes - two of them now gone - and hearing the modern and ancient music of my heart's language at the same time was a transforming experience. Not only because of the music, and the imperfections that my own ear still hears intact, but also thanks to the experience of knowing that my own hard yom's laila is over. Because unlike others who still live in a world of fear and lies and covering things up, who persist in creating a culture of conflict and elaborate deception in order to hide their mistakes, I'm home, and everything seems to be right.

Summer Plague, Popsicle Follies and Opera Death

2008-07-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

I can't even begin to tell you how much better I'm feeling this week. No RA symptoms, fevers have been down in the mornings (unfortunately, up in the evenings), and overall, I'm feeling much more human - especially after the earlier bout with this summer plague earlier in the week. I have to say that in spite of "being sick," this is probably the best I've felt since the summer of 2006. Having lost almost 20 lbs ain't so bad, either.

The cough, sadly, is hanging on. And it's not attractive. It tends to get worse at night, so I try to stay hydrated, keeping the iced glass of eight parts water to one part cranberry juice, limeade, orange juice, or whatever I've got in the fridge, close by. The evening ritual has also come to include a sugar-free Popsicle. This week I bought a 24-pack of "tropical fruit" flavors - which were probably developed in some kind of lab versus them actually containing any pineapple, orange, or something called Hawaiian Berry. The pops themselves are neon in hue and absolutely yummy, although I think the health benefit to be derived from it is pretty much zero.

Unfortunately, last night the Hawaiian Berry gave me a little scare. At around 11PM, I was in bed watching Family Guy when I got seized with a bad coughing fit. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom for some tissues. The coughing got out of control. I couldn't get my breath, and before I knew it - yeah, you guessed it - things got a little messy. Fortunately, I didn't Jimi Hendrix myself - but I ended up hurling all over the bathroom sink.

Here's the weird part. Upon recovery I noticed that the resulting yak was bright red in hue. For a horrible moment I was certain I had thrown up blood and that I was about to cough up a vital organ or two - that this was the end - I had finally discovered exactly what my Opera Death would look like.

To explain the concept of Opera Death: this is something my friends and I came up with while working for the Metropolitan Opera, way back in the nineties before the place was post-retro cool. Opera Death consists of falling prey to one of two scenarios: dying either of unrequited love or tuberculosis. Contrary to popular opinion, Opera Death can take place anywhere, not just in the nineteenth century. So long as it has some kind of Puccini-esque element of tragedy; you could off yourself in the middle of Giants Stadium, or cough yourself to pieces on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange; Tosca and Boheme ain't got nothing on some of the ideas we came up with - perishing from unrequited love for Richie Sambora at a Bon Jovi show at the Garden; hocking up a lung on the F train without even being noticed by the MTA. You get the idea.

But there was I was, faced with tubercular reality. Not Juliet but Mimi. Tiny hands frozen, standing over a white porcelain sink with the life-force spewed out before me. Not sure if I should call 911, my doctor or my mom. Or, in the typical way I handle illness, if I should just clean up and go back to bed and pretend it hadn't happened.

And then I realized that the so-called blood in the sink had the distinct appearance and characteristics of tropical fruit - some sort of cherry-berry neon effluvial quality that was nonetheless, the key to its identification. Insert jackass moment here.

Having eluded Opera Death for the time being, I pulled myself together, did what I had to do with the Basin Tub and Tile cleaner, changed into a clean t-shirt and went back to bed. Which was only fitting. One should probably go to their Opera Death in a long white ruffled nightgown, not so much a two year old t-shirt advertising a Hanukkah festival.

I've still got the cough, so just in case, I'll be sticking to pineapple flavor tonight.

Shabbat shalom, amigos.

Sweetmeats

2008-07-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

This evening, it occurred to me that if I were to lay out the names of my different medications - plaquenil, naproxen, methylprednisolone, xanax, hydrocodone, methotrexate, zithromax - on the Scrabulous board, I would end up with one hell of a word score.

I can't wait to be off this stuff. Well, except for the vicodin and the xanax. I'll keep those in my bag, just in case.

After almost a week down with a terribly nasty summer flu, I'm finally feeling a little better. And I have to say that it was awfully nice to be just sick, like a normal person, instead of feeling chronically crappy. The new diet is really working some miracles and marvels - and I feel like I am finally emerging from the mitzrayim (no, that's not another medication!) - the narrow place - of pain and emerging into a much healthier way of life - one where I am not in constant, agonizing pain every single day.

But here's something strange: since I eliminated two foods from my diet, I have almost no RA symptoms. Since I gave up sugar (in all its evil forms and with all its empty promises) and red meat, I no longer have any inflammation in my joints, my ankles have been restored to their natural state of girlish slender boniness (yay for pretty ankles!) and a heck of a lot of bloat is gone from my knees, elbows, and face.

I didn't give up red meat on purpose. I just stopped eating it because it's high in points, and why bother when you can have a turkey burger? Sugar, of course, was told to hit the trail about six weeks ago. I'm not really missing it anymore. I've got sugar-free Popsicles (dee-lish and points-free) and sugar-free Jello, so when the sugarbeast hits, I've got the weaponry at hand. But meat - well, that's kind of weird. I always figured it was benign, and since I am kind of anemic, a dietary necessity. Then again, there are leafy greens and peanut butter and spanakopita, if I really need to boot up the iron. (Why do I always hear echoes of those old Geritol commericals when I think about iron? Know what would be interesting? A Viagra-Geritol combination drug. Throw in some Lipitor and you'd be all set. Pfizer, are you listening?)

So, being sick this time around was interesting, if for no other reason that it gave me the chance to be...sick...? And actually, it also made me see how well I reallly am doing.

Thanks to Tom Selleck, I May Never Consume Sugar Ever Again:

2008-07-11T14:05:00.001-07:00

This has officially turned me off cake, probably forever. Now all I need to do is keep it in my fridge. It's the chest hair. Chest hair and cake. I get the heaves just thinking about it.

Shabbat shalom, y'all.

The Food Police

2008-07-09T12:57:00.000-07:00

There's a wonderful article in the Times today about a doctor who blogs about his life as a medical professional. They reported on his recent take on helping overweight patients - not by lecturing or shaming them, but instead helping them feel more positive about themselves: leading them to understand that they are worth the effort of being healthy and taking care of themselves. No one, he reasons, wants to take care of a body they feel guilty about or are ashamed of.

I think he's right. It's only through the maintenance of a healthy ego that one can be successful at anything they set out to do. For example, I had a bastard of a choir director in college who convinced me that my voice sucked and that Music and I would never be friends, much less buddies on a first-name basis. He was wrong: my voice doesn't suck, but it was years before I was comfortable singing again. Empirically, I realize that I do not have the makings of a Renee Fleming nor will I ever even be a competent music professional. But I enjoyed music and singing, until I ran into him, and sadly, I let his negative influence, shame and judgement take that enjoyment away from me. Authority, as they say, is powerful.

Another example: when I was a graduate student in the Poetry program at Temple University, I had a crackpot professor who thought she was seventeen different kinds of brilliant and clever because she published a couple of books (that no one outside of the walled garden of academe had ever heard of), she didn't own a television and had never even seen an episode of Happy Days. Now, I don't necessarily disagree with the television piece of this equation, but not understanding the post-apocalyptic modernist influence of the Tuscaderos on the fin de siecle works of Fonzarelli - that just ain't cool.

Luckily, by that point, I knew how to spot an insecure loser. All semester, we clashed over the fact that I didn't want to write just like her. I wanted to write like me, and apparently, that didn't really work for her so much. When she told me that I needed to go by my given name, because no one would ever accept Andi as anything more than "a perky little sorority girl name," I knew it was over. Leaving her book-lined, ego-hatchery of an office, I went straight to the authorities and defected into the Fiction program, where I lived happily ever after.

I'm not saying that everyone and anyone with a criticism is necessarily a bad person, or driven by their own insecurity to remark hurtfully on someone else's vulnerability. But I know that there have been many times when I could personally do without the comments, especially when they relate to food/eating habits/diets, etc. Yes, I'm glad that this or that diet worked for your sister or colleague or spouse. Or, it's nice that you paid enough attention to our relationship that you recognize a closet eater when you see one - and that you think it would benefit me greatly if I only eat when someone else is in the room. And it's interesting that you care oh-so-much about what I got from the deli today that you have to ask me about it - how many points are in it, whether or not I should really be eating it, etc.

Within the last three weeks, I've heard all of these comments. And in my head, even as well-meaning as they may be, they don't translate as being love or concern or advice. I hear them as blaming statements, as questioning my self-control, as another authority that tells me that I suck at this being healthy thing, and maybe I should just forget about it entirely.

Just imagine it: you're trying to strengthen your ego, find your soul in all of this struggle, making an attempt to unlisten to all the voices who have told you that you can't do it: telling you you're not competent to achieve this goal or accomplish this task. Then try telling yourself that you can achieve it, accomplish it, deal with it, get to a new place with it. By the time you're through listening to other peoples' voices, you're too tired to hear your own.

But there is one voice I keep trying to listen to: Torah tells us this - wisdom I keep going back to, over and over: it is not up in the heavens that someone else will have to reach up to get it and teach it to you; it is not across the sea that someone else will have to cross the sea to retrieve it and teach it to you - no, it is in your mouth, and in your heart, and you can do it.

Listening to it, reading it, and learning it, is one thing. Believing it: entirely another.

Rotation News

2008-07-08T13:41:00.000-07:00

For the moment, I am banning myself from writing about not feeling well. Even though I actually don't feel so hot today. Partly due to the weather, partly due to stress, partly due to the methotrexate - the Yellow Menace - having been injected somewhere along the port side yesterday morning at 8AM.

In today's email I received a document I look forward to every few months - the rotation news from my friend Esther, who is one of the curators at the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, of which I am a proud alumnae. MJH-ALMttH (as my dear, lovely former boss and friend Abby and I like to refer to it) was where I developed my chops as a marketer. My job at the Museum was the prototypical job that didn't feel like a job; it meant more to me than someplace where I sat at a desk and put in my hours. This was for both good and bad reasons: the good ones had a lot to do with our staff, a dynamic, passionate group of scholars and teachers and fundraisers and communications folk, most of whom possessed a vision about our work that went far beyond the day to day conflicts and stupidities that are part of every workplace.

What was tough about working at the Museum, however, was that everywhere you turned, there were stories of sadness. For every miraculous, tenacious, emotionally devastating story of survival, there were hundreds, even millions more of loss. For me, this was personified by the hallways that lined our office suite when we were located at 1 Battery Park Plaza. The walls were lined with portraits of children from before World War II. Some of them survived. Most of them didn't.

After 9/11, as you could imagine, it only got worse.

I hung on for three more years after that, but in the end, the neighborhood really got to me. The worst part was the immediate aftermath; I was literally terrified of being at work, scared to get on the subways in the morning, even, for a while, taking the bus from 42nd and 2nd all the way down to the Battery. I remember reading the first Harry Potter book during those bus rides, covering a lot of pages because it took so damn long. But it was better than being underground, disoriented, and utterly positive that the bomb would explode on the train that I was riding.

When I converted, one year after 9/11, so many of my colleagues came up to Larchmont for the ceremony, and in that hour, I realized that they had, in some sense, become my Jewish family. And what I didn't know about leaving the Museum was that I would never feel that sense of family and community in the workplace in quite the same way ever again; that little rituals like everyone wishing one another a Good Shabbos on a Friday afternoon really meant something. At the Museum, for all of the emotions and talk about budgets and decisions about color palettes and worry about attracting visitors, it was a place where people looked out for one another, where you could really rely on your team to support you, and know that at the end of the day, your work, quite possibly, may have changed someone's life.

So much of workplace life is about going through the motions, empty conversations, tolerating people because you have to; saying that you are part of a team, without ever really feeling it. In the end, I feel fortunate to have had this experience, and even more so when the Rotation News hits my inbox. I scroll through the images of the objects, reading about their history and their small, but key role in the greater story of survival that the Museum tells with such lyricism and poignancy. It may be a simple email, but for me, it is still about belonging to a family. I may not get to visit as much or as often as I would like to, but it is always good to remember that every so often, I can go home again.

And the OneTouch monitor goes to....

2008-07-07T11:07:00.000-07:00

The results are in. Blood sugar fasting: 201. A1C: 9.5. For context, normal blood sugar is in the range of 100 - 120. And anything over a 6 on the A1C essentially means, translated: you're screwed.

So, it's time to get those numbers down; time to start taking (yet another) medication. And probably, as well, time to get myself one of those damn sugar meters so I can look forward to bloody fingertips and the end of my guitar-playing days (not that I ever really learned.). Forgive me. I'm basically just whining at this point.

I can't even get an appointment with the diabeasties doctor until September, which may or may not be a bad thing. I am hoping that through Weight Watchers, diligent exercise, and some sort of fracking miracle, I can rid myself of this nonsense and get on with my life.

This is kind of sucky. Traditionally, four days out of the year, on the Andi calendar, are supposed to be somewhat better days because those are the ones on which the four Beatles were born. I gotta say, the fact that it's Ringo's birthday is not really helping me out here. Is it because he wasn't one of the originals? Maybe I should be looking to Pete Best for help here. Or even Andy White, who recorded the single for Love Me Do because George Martin didn't think Ringo had the chops.

Sometimes I can't even figure out why my brain takes these detours. But I would put money on it having something to do with not really wanting to face reality at the moment.

I am, however, digging the Lilias! Yoga and You font of today's image. I guess if I've gotta have some stupid disease, I can still try to be as groovy as possible about it.

A1C, easy as 1-2-3, simple as do-re-mi....

2008-07-02T16:00:00.000-07:00

So here I am, awaiting the results of this week's blood sugar test (fasting), and the A1C hemoglobin test which measures the history of sugar in your red blood cells over a three to four month period. Fascinating. It's insane knowing that the oldest blood cells currently represented in this test are probably emblazoned with logos from McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts. The newer ones, thankfully, are bearing the blue-green swirl of Weight Watchers. Sadly, however, the well-behaved blood cells are outnumbered three to one.

I shudder to think what the A1C will reveal about my pre-scare eating habits. As if the guilty history of every cheeseburger and french fry will be written for medical professionals to divine in letters of sugar. Compared with my virtuous, self-righteous little month-old red blood cells, the old ones are probably like depraved winos with a criminal record and a chip on their shoulder. Come to think of it, that's pretty much how I was eating.

The test is probably back by now; I had it Monday morning. I'd like to think that if it was really bad, like "you need to go on insulin NOW' bad, I'd have heard from my doctor already. So I'm hoping that no news is good news, that the results will wait until Monday morning. And of course, I really hope that I've made a month-old dent in the last blood sugar number. Which revealed itself in a non-fasting test, after I'd had a Coke.

Carb fact of the day: Something that I thought was healthy apparently isn't: those baked Lay's chips have 44 grams of carbs per serving (compared with, say, Smartfood popcorn at 9 grams of carbs per snack bag). Apparently, I am only supposed to have 30 grams of carbs per meal in order to keep things of a diabetic nature under control. Here's the thing: Smartfood is 3 points on Weight Watchers; baked Lay's are 2. I can't believe this freaking label-reading and carb counting is my life now. And all I really want is a cheeseburger.

Jitters

2008-06-27T14:52:00.000-07:00

What does it mean that the only way for me to calm my nerves before leading services is to watch this video?

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/uncensored.shtml

High Anxiety

2008-06-26T15:23:00.000-07:00

I am so nervous about leading services tomorrow night because I'm giving the sermon. I'm done writing it, but oh, it is just SO outreachy and typical.

Basically the story is this: Korach leads a rebellion against Moses and Aaron. Korach is basically like George W. Bush, a bad, greedy, erstwhile wanna-be who cloaks his lust for ambition and wealth in a G-dly message (that G-d is an equal opportunity leadership trainer and so Moses and Aaron are needlessly raising themselves above the others).

Eventually, after falling on his face (Moses does a lot of that) the argument escalates and Moses shuts it down by suggesting they engage in an old-west style incense and firepan throwdown. G-d, he tells Korach, will reveal the true leader.

And G-d shows up to cast the winning vote. It's like Iron Chef, except that Korach and his 250 rebels get swallowed up by the earth, instead of humiliation at the hands of the Chairman and Fukui San.

Classic story line from My Bodyguard (anyone remember that movie?) Or when Jerry Mouse takes the thumbtack out of Butch the Bulldog's paw and gets a golden whistle in return. Anytime Tom hassles him: just whistle. And receive some fine Old Testamant justice for your trouble.

I know I have all day tomorrow to tweak this but this is one of those moments when I wonder how pertinent the whole conversion thing will be. Will people be willing to forgive an outreachy drash because it's given by a Jew-by-Choice? Or will I be held to a different standard, that I don't have to be as smart or cool since I wasn't born into this people. Or will they just think I'm out and out stupid and that I should just stick to singing. You can't mess up the lecha dodi too badly, even if you were born Catholic.

Speaking of which: hopefully the singing part won't go too badly.

Shabbat shalom.

Imagine

2008-06-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

So there I was last night, sitting on my couch and watching Law & Order, as I am wont to do on weeknights when I am actually at home, when the phone rang. 503 area code. Oregon. It could only be one person.

It was my dearly cherished, long-lost friend Jim, red of hair, blue of eyes, kind of heart. And also, sadly enough, a foot soldier in the sugar wars.

Jim and I met on the very first day of freshman year at the University of Delaware. How I ended up there still remains a mystery. Sure, they gave me a crapload of scholarship money, but in at least 87 different ways, it was the wrong school for me. That being said, I definitely didn't want to go to the tiny upstate Catholic college that my parents had in mind. At 18, I just wanted to get the hell out of New York. I didn't want to deal with the snow, mean state troopers patrolling the Quickway, or seeing people that I knew from high school.

What I didn't know at the time was that there were no bagels, no art-house films, no good hair stylists, and no one I was close with to be found in the state of Delaware. So when I met Jim, at a sunny September afternoon reading group for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (one's of UD's required summer reading titles), I was happy just to have made a friend.

And we were great friends, inseparable for that first semester. He was, inevitably, the person who got me fascinated with the Old Testament, since we would stay up till all hours debating religion, talking about books (poetry in general, Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions in particular), classes, music, family expectations - all the strange and lovely things you think about when you're 18. When you don't have any idea that soon enough, you won't have time to think about them anymore.

In some way, perhaps because he wasn't one of the 87,000 students who already knew each other through Delaware's incestuous high school system, or maybe because we both loved the Beatles, poetry, G-d and hiking through the nearby state park, my time with him made up for almost all of the things I was missing about New York.

When my dad had a heart attack that December, Jim was the person who took the eight hour bus ride up to NYC and back with me, and then went with me on Metro North up to New Rochelle so we could visit my dad in the ICU. I remember that when we walked into the room, my dad was sitting up, with that irrepressible grin, green eyes sparkling. He pointed to the clock on the wall. "Do you believe this crap?" he asked us. "Not even a TV set. All I've got is this goddamn clock. If I had my gun, I'd shoot it."

All righty then. Hi, Dad, this is my friend Jim (who probably now thinks that the next bullet is for him).

After we broke up second semester (I went home over winter session to break up with the person I was dating; he didn't) we drifted apart somewhat, especially after his exceedingly immature and hostile high school sweetheart arrived at Delware in our sophomore year. But somewhow, we managed to stay friends throughout college and for years afterwards, years that brought us his wedding to that very same exceedingly immature and hostile high school sweetheart, my Masters degree and the pathetic first draft of The Bookseller's Sonnets, his divorce from his high school sweetheart, my getting pushed down a flight of South Philly stairs by a drunk ex-boyfriend.

When he finally left town in the wake of that painful divorce and moved to Alaska, I visited for a couple of weeks, some of which we spent hiking the Kenai Peninsula. Those weeks were among the happiest and weirdest and most awkward of my life. We didn't know where we were going, what we wanted to do with our lives, how to get ourselves out of the long-distance mess we had gotten ourselves into. Finally, homesickness got me in the end and even as much as I adored him, and as much as I cried on that eleven-hour Northwest flight back to JFK, I couldn't wait to get home to my real life - my friends, my family - back in New York.

Collectively, our parents thought we were a perfect match. I bought him a watch for Christmas. My dad helped me pick it out. "We're here for the watch now," he told the family jeweler. "Next year, I think we'll be back for the ring.

But in the end, we never picked out that ring. It wasn't anything specific, like religion (which it could have been) or the distance (which it also could have been). Time passed; being apart brought with it too many tears, too much drama. And by the time we had both made three trips back and forth across the country, we realized we just didn't love each other in quite the right way that you need to make a life together. It just wasn't destiny. It wasn't basherte. It wasn't meant to be.

Time has changed us both; last night we talked about sugar, carbs, the glycemic index. Then I got to hear all about life in Oregon with his wife and his two beautiful little girls - his is a good life, a blessed life. And listening to his advice, hearing us both laughing again, made me feel just as safe and cared for and befriended as I felt all those years ago, walking into the ICU to see my dad, afraid of what the outcome would be. I didn't feel old enough to lose a father then. I still don't feel old enough now.

After I hung up the phone, I was hit with a sudden memory, unbidden, of the two of us sitting together in the dark of the movie theater on Main Street in Newark, watching the documentary Imagine. The phone rang again - my friend Ellen, from California, checking in - and I picked up the remote to surf with the sound off. And there it was, nearly twenty years later, on VH1 Classic - John and Yoko, hand in hand, walking towards the warm orange light of a New York City sunset.

As I stared at the screen I realized it: we are both now almost as old as John Lennon was when he died.

So it goes.

A Public Service Announcement from St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower

2008-06-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

"I have reached the point where I can suffer no more, because all suffering is sweet to me." -- Saint Therese de Lisieux, a.k.a. The Little Flower

Yeah, sorry, St. Therese: I'm not there yet.

For any of you who may currently be, or may someday be taking shots of methotrexate to control an auto-immune disease, here's some advice: your ass, really, is the best location.

Yesterday I had my weekly shot, and just not wanting to deal with the perpetual indignity of dropping trou every damn week, I asked my rheumatologist if I could get it in the arm.

Big mistake.

When I started methotrexate, I knew it was a tough drug to deal with, but my RA has become increasingly severe, and the other drugs (steroids, plaquenil, etc) weren't making an impact. So I decided to look upon methotrexate as a band of roaming, angry nuns who were going to restore respect and order to my g-dless immune system. Get those white blood cells under control. Show those damn rheumatic fevers who's boss. Whip out the paddle, yardstick, or two-pound metal ruler (favorite teaching tools of the nuns of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception) and go all Barefoot Carmelites of Prague on this disease.

But it didn't really work that way. First of all, I was taking pills. Six of them broken up into two pills three times a day - once a week. Everyone said to make sure I took them before the weekend so that I wouldn't be in bad shape once Saturday arrived. Unfortunately, there were still Thurday and Friday to think about. Methotrexate taught me many things: for instance, how many words one could make out of the phrase SPARE ROLL PUSH engraved on the toilet paper dispener in our restroom. (So far PURPLE and LEPROUS are my faves).

It also taught me a different way of observing Shabbat by being too sick to move from one's couch on Friday night, and falling asleep in front of What Not to Wear; or alternatively listening to Stacy and Clinton berate some poor unsuspecting woman for her fashion choices, as I hung out at an undisclosed location on the floor of my bathroom. I would, of course, much rather have been at services. Prostrating oneself before the porcelain god - not exactly the same as standing before the Ark, if you know what I mean.

So in desperation, I switched to shots. Went to the pharmacy to get hooked up with syringes and vials (and found out that syringes apparently are not an everyday request in Larchmont), but my health insurance wouldn't pay for me to self-inject in the privacy of my own home. So every week I get the grand and glorious opportunity, at $50 a pop, to moon my doctor and get injected with 6ccs of this horrific solution that looks like piss and smells like formaldehyde. I stand there, temporarily pants-free, feel that damn needle go in and think to myself that this just can't be good for me in the long-term.

My family, in their usual helpful way, thinks this whole RA thing is all a crock. At best, I think they see it punishment for my failure to adhere to their standards of beauty. That I got this disease by my own fault, by being overweight. And I shouldn't complain about it, because if only I were thin, I wouldn't even need the damn drug. And that when I lose the weight, the RA will pack up and go away. Not only will being thin solve that problem, I'll also get married! And then perhaps I'll even shoot rainbows and butterflies out my ass.

But this week was different. I got the shot in my arm yesterday, and lo and behold, I am sick as hell today, the way I was when I took the pills. So far, I've managed to eat an apple. And drink some water. And a couple of sips of diet Coke. What I really want is a ginger ale and maybe some rice, but I'm scared of the sugar and carbs. Maybe I can't win for losing, but then again, as far as the diabetic thing is concerned, I do agree with my family: I did this to myself.

So, Little Flower, suffering may be sweet to you, but it surely can't be as sweet as kvetching is to my people. I don't exactly see your point of view, because my illnesses - and maybe even yours, too - are anything but sweet - and I mean that in the Splenda sense of the word. But you're a saint, and heaven knows, I'm not. So perhaps it all worked out for you; then again, since you died at 24, you missed out on a lot of potential sweetness in life. I may be a kvetch, but I'm planning on avoiding dying young, no matter how sweet it is.

The Corner Table

2008-06-20T12:29:00.000-07:00

Today this blog is being brought to you by the good people at the Scarsdale Borders Books and Music, located on White Plains Road in the Vernon Hills Shopping Center.

Technically I am working from home, but since the cable is out, and I have no phone line, I came on over here for the WiFi and the coffee.

This Borders holds a special place in my heart, as this is the place I spent a significant amount of time back in the spring of '05. Saying that being here saved my life might be a bit of an overstatement, but perhaps it isn't. That year, on March 1st, was the day I decided to end a relationship that I thought was going to be my saving grace - it was supposed to change my life, get me out of a New York that was haunted by the ghosts of smoke and ash and low-flying planes. He was supposed to be my rescuer, my knight, my sweet prince. But in real life he was sad and struggling, and the sadder he became and the more he struggled, the more he seemed to feel that it was my fault; that my success was somehow to blame for his failures.

And so it ended. I knew it was for the best, especially when friends and family members, one by one, came forward to spew the simmering invective about the Former Loved One; seeing how much angst and anger and anxiety they had held back taught me a lot about the lengths that friends will go to in order to keep from hurting your feelings.

But the transitional period didn't end with a breakup. Nope. Ten days later my father was gone, in a strange flash of blood to the brain, like the final bright blink of a lightbulb. One last light, one luminous blinding eyeful - then nothing.

After shivah I went back to work. A week later, I was told that while I had been out, the foundation realized that it didn't really need a communications director anymore. They handed me a three month severance package and wished me good luck.

It was that point at which I wondered what exactly the point was in waking up the next morning.

But there was a point; a light; a reason: the one thing my father had never let me forget was that I was a writer. That like him, I loved nothing more than a good story. When he was a homicide detective, it was as if he loved justice most, but in close second was his desire to put the right end to a story that a murder or a rape or an injustice had begun. I had been hit with three acts of injustice, right in a row - it was as if he was telling me that I needed to find the right ending.

And that was how I found the corner table - the one here, at Borders, where I arrived every morning between nine and ten, ordered my toasted bagel and a large Coke (oh, G-d how I miss Coke), and sat down at my borrowed laptop to write. In the space of ten weeks, I completed the first draft of The Bookseller's Sonnets, my beloved little book about murder and justice, rape and identity, history and eyewitness: with my story I tried to put to right all of the things that had happened to me. It wasn't justice, certainly, but it was something.

I sat at the table every day and gazed out the window at the little garden terrace. There were days that friends came over and bought me coffee and rice krispies treats; I loved that they knew where to find me. There were days I sat alone and wrote chapter after chapter, days that I sat and wondered if I would ever find another job, if I would ever find love again, and I wrote nothing at all. Some days I just sat and cried about my dad. Other days I was able to recreate the scene of his death in the hospital for one of my characters in a way that I could never do now because it is too sacred and scary to think about.

Three years later and the corner table is gone. It's been replaced by a couple of leather chairs, a small table to hold lattes and magazines. But that little corner is still sacred to me. It is still the birthplace of hope, of creativity, of my healing. It is the place that helped me create the perfect ending, and at the same time, a new beginning.

The Sixth Circle

2008-06-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

Inevitably, on the weight loss journey up from the depths of hell, we pay a visit to my family. I'm placing them in Dante's sixth circle, as this is the home for the followers of Epicurus - which may be where all the trouble started in the first place.

Now, I'm not exactly in the business of blaming others for my own shortcomings. Hell, even when I lost my last job, I was the first person to say that I wasn't doing it well anymore. At the end of the day, I was just too damn sick to manage the workload. I'm not saying that the organization wasn't full of poisonous and depraved jerks (I'm not talking about you, Howard) and that I wasn't set up to fail pretty much from day one, because that was the nature of the beast, but hey, I take plenty of that responsibility on my shoulders - I wasn't performing to where I wanted to be. I'm just not sure that anyone would be capable of those unrealistic standards.

But getting back to the subject of blame, I have to say that my family has played a not-so-supporting role in this whole unhealthy lifestyle of mine. First and foremost, I have to question my family's relationship with food: everything in our home was about rewarding with food - both my parents (especially my dad) and my sister are total foodies. Whenever we had a celebration, the dinner or the dessert or the restaurant was always the first point of the rewards discussion. And when I showed an inclination to put on weight, even as a little kid, being left out of those celebrations (or, in other words, here's some melba toast rounds for you while everyone else gets birthday cake) wasn't easy. And for heaven's sake, who enrolls an eight-year-old in Weight Watchers?

Yeah, that's right: technically, I've been on this diet since 1978.

After Weight Watchers failed, it was Diet Center: that was when I was 14. Basically on this plan, you stop eating, and replace much of your normal food intake with vitamin supplements. At the time I was already taking a crapload of mineral supplements for my potassium/magnesium deficiency. So during this little sojourn, I was taking 96 pills a day.

What sort of parents think this is a good idea?

Obviously 96 pills a day is not sustainable for any length of time. Which leads to the next diet, a homemade speciality concoction called "Your Sister is Getting Married and the Bridesmaids' Dress Only Goes Up to Size 10."

Man, you should have seen it. It was 1987. Think Krystle on Dynasty. Off-white, puffed sleeves, huge balloony tulle skirt, tight-fitting bodice with a sweetheart neckline. I looked like a Green Bay Packer in a drag version of Swan Lake.

So even after the forced dieting (food consumption was strictly monitored and limited to melba toast rounds, sliced smoked turkey, and celery) and being dragged to aerobics classes three times a week, I still couldn't fit into the damn dress. I did, however, end up with a lifelong aversion to the songs "You Should Hear How She Talks About You" and "Let's Dance," two of the workout songs from Susan Marlowe - I still get a facial tic every time I hear them.

When they finally gave up two weeks before the Big Day and allowed me to choose another dress, I was blamed for "ruining the wedding." Yeah, glad I was able to help. Considering that they're now contemplating divorce, maybe the dress was a contributing factor?

After that, in the summer between freshman and sophomore year of college, I made a stupid move on my own account: Optifast. It worked. Oh dear G-d, did it ever work. 50 lbs gone in six weeks. Then there's this little problem called eating. Because you don't eat for the six weeks - you only drink shakes four times a day. Of course you can lose 50 lbs in six weeks. But guess what happens as soon as you start eating actual food again?

Yeah, it happened to Oprah too.

The highlight of being on Optifast for me was the one time I cheated. I went to Lange's Deli in Scarsdale and bought myself a turkey sandwich. I ate it holed up like a criminal in the back of the vault in the Bank of New York branch where I was working as a summer teller. To this day, it was one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten. Mostly because I hadn't eaten any other food in four weeks.

As a result of Optifast I got a new wardrobe, a new boyfriend (or three) and a chronic case of strep throat which lasted for 9 months and ended up with me getting my tonsils out the next summer, by which time I had pretty much gained all the weight back.

After that there were several other initiatives, both family- and self-inflicted. Jenny Craig (expensive failure); another round or two at Weight Watchers (Fat & Fiber, 1-2-3 Success - whatever); some grapefruit thing. When I moved back home after grad school for a couple of months while looking for an apartment, my mom actually went out and bought fat-free American cheese to replace the Kraft singles I had in the fridge. She put them in the same packaging and figured she could fool me into eating more healthfully. I don't like Kraft singles anymore, but seriously, like I wouldn't notice?

The strange part is that even with all of the food issues, yo-yo dieting, and conflict that this caused in my family, they never changed: we still celebrated everything with food - it always remained the reward for success, and was the favorite punishment and exclusion tool for my family whenever I wasn't where they wanted or expected me to be weight-wise.

I ended up doing Weight Watchers again in '01 and was very successful: I think I had actually grown up enough to want to take control and do something healthy for myself. But even though I was successful, the old ghosts got me and as soon as I started to look good again, I freaked out and fell off the wagon. You see, being fat has always been the easiest way to deflect unwanted attention, to keep potential bad people away, to not have to deal with my past and to not have to deal with the fear of bad things happening to me in the future.

But now there is no choice as to whether or not I can stay overweight: I have to do this, for better or for worse, for ugly or for pretty, whether I want to or not, otherwise I am not going to live long enough to achieve the things I want to do: writing another couple of books, becoming a rabbi, maybe even going back to Alaska someday. The fact that it is now a health issue and not a looks issue does take a lot of the extraneous baggage off the cart but I know it's going to be an issue and I need to find the best way to overcome it once it starts happening. It's not even that I worry about meeting someone like Claude again - I just don't see myself as wanting to have that kind of attention - and of course I am afraid that the people who love and value me now will love and value me differently once I start to look different - as if I will be a better or more worthy person in their eyes than the one I am now.

Not half an hour ago, my sister lectured me about how first of all, it was never about my looks (bridesmaid dress anyone?) and that I am too focused on being a sick person, that all I do is worry about doctor's appointments, blood tests, treatments for RA, whether or not I am strong enough to go back to the gym - and how no one should have to hear about how tough it is, how depressing it is to be around me. It's funny - when I was eating badly I obviously couldn't do anything right. Now that I'm really trying to get healthy again, and I could really use some support, obviously I can't do that right, either.

I know it's no one's fault but my own that I am in the bad place that I'm in now. But it's sad to me that I am still failing to achieve my family's support or approval in this process. And it's even sadder to think that without their constant focus on my weight for the past thirty years, I may not have had quite so many problems and issues with it. Unfortunately there is no way that I can see to take them out of this equation. I only wish the equation was a basic mathematical function, not the calculus of memory and fear and sadness that it seems to be at the moment.

Holding

2008-06-18T10:18:00.000-07:00

As I write I am literally on hold with my insurance company, as I failed to answer two security questions correctly, and am now locked out of my account.

Interesting music. So this is where Bruce Hornsby's career ended up.

Are there even actual people creating this music, or is it just computers using the Phil Collins 2.0 software?

Yes, I know you appreciate my patience. I'm glad my call is important to you.

OK. 5 minutes, 4 seconds and still holding. Thanks for letting me know you are experiencing heavier than normal call volume. Oh sure, I'd go to your website, except that I am still locked out of my account.

Oh wow, a person! And she's helpful! And - bada bing, bada boom, I'm in! Woot!

+ + + + + + + + + + +

That being said, I am holding up pretty well with the new dietary regime, although it feels quite a bit more Pinochet than New Frontier. I really want something totally unhealthy for lunch - I won't even say it here because I am so damn suggestible - but I can't. I know it would be bad and wrong and stupid when I am doing so well. But this isn't easy. Then again, neither is coma, blindness and heart disease.

Embracing the Yuk

2008-06-16T14:24:00.001-07:00

Well, kids, it's official: I did it. I've got me some diabetes. Or as I will probably continue to refer to it, the diabeasties.

I know, my darlings, I know. This is not good. My dad had diabetes as a complication of heart disease; his diagnosis was rapidly followed by both of his sisters coming down with the hot mess. And of course, the news isn't much better on Mom's side: her dad died of it; but what was worse, two of her aunts lived with it: a veritable cornucopia of blindness, amputations, high blood pressure: the gift basket no one wants. And I know that my family and friends are now officially worried sick: I totally understand. If my darling Connor or Ryan came home with this news, I would basically clear the house of all the Nilla Wafers, Devil Dogs, Fruit Roll-Ups, Teddy Grahams, etc. and forbid them from ever consuming that crap again. And it is because I love them and I want them to have happy healthy lives.

So I am working on ridding myself of the bad stuff: my friend Joe today told me: "Here's the rule: no more white food." Which sucks because that eliminates a whole bunch of stuff I like, but in the immortal words of the Brady kids: When it's time to change, you've got to rearrange -- who you are into what you're gonna be (sha-na-na-na na na-na na-na, sha-na na-na-na).

What happens next? A whole battery of tests: something called an A1C to see just how reversible this bad boy is: followed by more tests, classes at White Plains hospital on how to manage blood sugar testing (if it comes to that), medication, wellness, etc. The good news is, I have lost 12 lbs already on Weight Watchers (after 3 weeks back on the chain gang) and when I began that, I decided to eliminate sugar, in all its evil forms and with all of its empty promises.

Having poured the Tennessee Valley Authority Irrigation Project's worth of Coke down my gullet for the past 4 years, I can say it's a big change. No sugar, no ice cream, no cake, no high fructose corn syrup, no chocolate, no candy, no soda, not even ginger ale. Everything in the market seems to have a big old skull and crossbones on it. Only problem is, everything that I should be eating still has a Mr. Yuk sticker, if only in my head. I just don't like the healthy stuff - whole grains, veggies, fiber - ugh, gross. I am your classic All-American first-string fat-ass, susceptible to temptation and convenience. If I didn't live in New York, with all these great restaurants and cooking options, G-d help me, I'd probably be a regular at Olive Garden.

But it's time to embrace the Yuk. Fiber One has no points, and it doesn't taste that bad. Weight Watchers ice cream is great even though I think it's made of whale parts. And I tried whole wheat bread today for lunch, and you know what? It was pretty good. I must keep chanting the mantra. The Yuk is health and wholeness. The Yuk is good and righteous, and I don't want to get my toes cut off. The Yuk is the light, and I don't feel like having a stroke just yet. The Yuk is inspiration. And the Yuk is love.

The RJ Guide to Reform Judaism: 30 Stories

2008-06-10T10:28:00.000-07:00

Normally, as many of you are well aware, I absolutely prefer to hide my light under a rock. Nonetheless I am just so damn tickled at being part of Reform Judaism magazine's recently-published feature The RJ Guide to Reform Judaism: 30 Stories, which explores through several first-person narratives what it means to be a Reform Jew today, with all the complications, celebrations, insights and ideas that identifying with our movement can bring about.

So what does it mean to me, you may ask? For those of you that know me, and know my story (Catholic upbringing, conversion, blah blah blah future rabbi-cakes), obviously you know that it means a great deal. I meant what I said when I wrote that having attended Catholic school was probably one of the the most influential factors in my decision to convert to Judaism. Our school environment was filled with reverence and the understanding that G-d's presence was real; that in fact, S/He was in the room with us. To that end, every lesson began and ended with a prayer; if we heard a siren outside the window we immediately stopped what we were doing to pray for the person in trouble - a habit I still carry to this day, though without the Hail Mary text. Which is interesting, given that my office is next door to a firehouse. The nuns warned us never to get used to the sound, and never to tune it out - if we did, we could miss an opportunity to ask G-d for help on behalf of someone who might not be able to ask themselves.

The memories of those classrooms are more vivid and concrete than any other classrooms I ever sat in - the way the light poured in through the windows, the set-up of reading and math and coloring areas, even the taste of the pretzels that came in those industrial cardboard boxes. We thanked G-d for all of those things, and others too, on a daily basis: every morning began with singing about the miracles and marvels around us, and every day concluded with the nuns blessing us to leave and return in safety.

Sound familar? It did to me when I started exploring Judaism. It was amazing that so much of my original faith was there, waiting to be reclaimed. When I switched to public school, I lost that sense of reverence, of safety and sanctity. But what I never knew was that it was there all the time, and I was lucky enough to find it again. Heaven knows that I probably overparticipate in congregational life - my friend Danielle once remarked that when you convert, you overcompensate so hard for not being born Jewish that you end up on all the committees and you know you'd end up giving your car to someone if they asked for it nicely. But what I get back from all of my participation is that same sense again - of light coming in, of protection and safety, of knowing that I'm blessed whenever I leave, and whenever I come home again.

So I'm very proud to represent my congregation in 30 Stories. For more about it, or to read the narratives themselves, click here.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

2008-06-06T13:58:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, my very first blog was designed to be a creative outlet as I set out on a journey to lose weight, get healthy, and turn my life around. Both projects - the blog and the weight loss - failed miserably.

Here's what happened in the time spent between blogs: My father died. I was laid off. I wrote a book. I lost some weight and gained it back. And then I got a new job, allegedly as an Associate Marketing Director (but what she really wanted was a yes-girl) working for a world-class cultural institution that employed some of the most ridiculously evil people I've ever met.

After a year of mental, emotional, and physical workplace abuse, I got sick. Very sick. With a staph infection that wouldn't respond to medication, threats, violence or entreaties for mercy. Three hospital stays later, I ended up hooked up to an IV machine for 3 hours a day for two months, had a tiny piece of bone removed from my left foot, and ended up with an extended tour of duty on crutches.

After the whole ordeal ended, I was diagnosed with severe rheumatoid arthritis - "a little souvenir of a terrible year."

Oh, and after I got sick, you guessed it: I got fired.

On the other side of the darkness, there were also good things: I finished my book, and found a fabulous new agent. I applied to rabbinical school. And - miracle of miracles - I got in, but failed the Hebrew entrance exam.

A year later and I'm still trying to get it together: to learn this language so that I can escape the realm of Sales and Marketing; to get healthy and back to a reasonable facsimile of myself before the Death Eaters got me. I still feel haunted by what happened in my old job, by the consequences of not taking care of myself - consequences of pain, vulnerability, sadness and solitude that I still live with every day. Like a prairie dog who is too scared to do more than peer up from her hole in the ground, there are days I prefer to spend underground, because even with all of the good things, and all of the blessings, in my heart, I'm still afraid of the light.

I tell myself it doesn't matter. People lose jobs every day. People lose themselves in illness and are forced to cut back. I try not to focus on the losses - the loss of prestige, the decrease in expendable income, not even the uselessness and boredom I feel every day when I'm not racing around like a crazy person - the way I used to - just to try to avoid incurring the wrath of She-Who-Must-Not-Be Named (but who will be called Mimi Fiedler in my next book).

I tell myself I need the time to heal, the time to make sure I don't do anything stupid again. I tell myself I need better boundaries. And finally, I tell myself that if I had actually stuck to my guns, and achieved that original goal of eating right, losing weight, and being healthy, perhaps I wouldn't have ended up in such a bad place.

So I'm starting over. Call it Operation Or Chadash - a new light.

In my first post on my old blog, I remember quoting Deuteronomy - the verse I chant every year on Yom Kippur:

It is not up in the heavens, that someone will have to go up, and get it, and bring it back and teach you. It is not across the sea, so that someone will have to cross it, and get it, and bring it back and teach you. No, it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do it.

That was how I felt - as if my goals were near to me, as if - even broken - the world was still full of possibility. But today I reflect on the words Lady Augusta Gregory's poem, "The Grief of a Girl's Heart:

You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me.

You have taken what is before me, and what is behind me.

You have taken the sun, you have taken the moon from me.

And oh - my fear is great - you have taken God from me.

It's amazing what a job - an illness - a broken promise - can take with it when it finally goes away. So perhaps this time, it is not so much about what I need to lose. It is about what I need to get back.