weightless

“Take the pressure off,” she says.

My mother tells me this after we’ve just gotten into an argument too big and too much for before work on a Friday morning. And I am doing my best “not gonna cry,” but it’s not working.

I hate arguing with my mother because it makes me feel sixteen. And I have not wanted to feel sixteen since I was sixteen.

“Just take the pressure off…”

The pressure is the fact that after five days, no news has been given to me on my car which sits battered and bruised in some body shop 25 miles away. I’ve been forced to make five calls each day between the shop and the insurance company to no avail. The shop says talk to the insurance company. The insurance company says talk to the shop. The insurance company then gives me three different adjuster phone numbers all who whom say they are not my adjuster and can’t help me.

And so I wait.

Frustrating is knowing that if the car is totaled I have about $3,000 to find a new one. Because though it would be awesome to have that brand spankin’ new car smell going on – I can’t afford a car payment. I can’t afford a car payment because I left the great paying job to follow the dream. And the dream ain’t going so well. And without a decision, I am wasting time not resolving the issue.

More frustrating is the nagging feeling no woman who is 29 and alone and unhappy wants to say out loud: that if I had a man, he would be dealing with this and the insurance people and the shop people would realistically, most likely, take him more seriously. They would not keep him waiting around for an entire week. And if he raised his voice the word “bitchy” would not enter the realm of thought. He’d simply be justified in his frustration.

And said man would then keep me together by wrapping his arms around me when I’m shaking in tears after yet another pointless phone call followed by a blow up with my best friend.

But said man has yet to make an appearance. And so the frustration abounds.

And the truth is I probably am doing some sort of disservice to women everywhere by acting as though I can’t get through bad days with the male species…but I can. And I have for some time now. I have moved my own furniture, fixed my own broken electronics, grilled my own meat. I’ve aired up my own tires and I didn’t even cry at the deer. I cried at the damage.

I know what McTalk-to-Me would say. He would say to acknowledge the aloneness but move on, keep going. Don’t lose it on your mother at 7:15 in the morning.

And I already know, that when I get home, I’ll crank the music and dance it out. I’ll revel in the silence rather than the drama. I’ll calm and fall asleep after a stressful week and it’ll all seem less threatening.

But it doesn’t make attending events solo any easier. It doesn’t make crawling into an empty bed any more comforting. And it won’t fix my car or heal the bitter words between the BFF or any other FF’s for that matter and me. It won’t fix my car.

And at the end of the day, it doesn’t relieve any of the pressure.

moms

To be quite honest, I'm a bit surprised at what I think of when I hear the word "mother." Almost immediately I envision golden sunrises, Donna Reed aprons and breakfast foods so heavy with buttermilk, eggs and greasy meat that one might as well not even begin to count calories.

I think of sunsets on sticky summer nights when the only thing that has any power of the humidity is ice cold lemonade and when the only thing that soften the aches and pains of a fever or the flu is the cold washcloth held to your forehead or the chicken soup that she'll cross town to bring you even when you're old enough to cook your own. I'm surprised at my initial reaction to the word because I have grown up in a life that has taught me well enough that motherhood is not all Donna Reed aprons and calorific foods.

When I think longer about the what I think motherhood means... I think of how I was blessed with the influences of exceptionally strong mothers in my life. On my maternal side, my grandmother is the mother of 15 children. Hers is a life filled with the teachings of thank yous and pleases and buttoning up shirts and making sure everyone was in school on time. And my grandfather helped. She cooked all the dinners and the breakfasts and the lunches and she still does. And she's always the last one to sit down to the table.

She turned those 15 children into bright, intelligent, successful human beings. Who know how to laugh when what they may want to do is cry, who find strength in just the sound of her voice. Her love knows no time and no distance, as many of her children live an ocean away in a country thousands of miles and who knows how many time zones apart.

She bites her tongue when she has to, a trial and tribulation that comes when children grow up and insist they know what's best for themselves - but she's not afraid to speak her mind.

In her strength, I see my own mother. The single mother who raised three children, worked full time and still fought for a well balanced dinner that we were all to sit down to together. As we children battled adolescence and nursed our broken family wounds, she put her heart last. Left it carefully on a shelf as she made sure our clothes were clean and our shoes were tied and we didn't forget to thank our grandparents or wash the dishes. When we're young, those are the things that seem standard. But they end up meaning everything. We spend a lot of our grown-up time trying to recreate those dinners, searching for detergent that's not only organic, but smells vaguely of childhood.

When her eyes were heavy with sleep, she kept herself up long enough to soothe our own fears as we lay beneath the blankets, warding off our nightmares. And when we became the ungrateful adolescents that all children become at one time or another - she swallowed the hurtful words we slung at her and always said goodnight with an 'I love you.'

Though I never got a chance to really know my paternal grandmother - she lives in a vivid memory from a very young age. And sometimes, even when we haven't had the chance to know our mothers or our grandmothers through and through - their strength is evident in presence. I remember her fondly. As kind. And with very strong hands.

And I have been blessed to see some of my closest friends transition into motherhood. And perhaps that experience has helped me to the perspective I have on motherhood today.

That the best parts of our mothers - have nothing to do with us at all.

My favorite stories of my mother, are about her, her days at work, what she enjoys about her home, the things she did when she was seventeen. Many of my favorite photos of her are those that capture her at that age, young and with long flowing hair, delicate with an underlying strength the world had not yet seen.

My favorite stories of my grandmother are the ones she tells where I can envision her on a kibbutz in Israel sipping on cups of coffee laced with cream, tossing words back and forth with the rest of the motherly clan. My favorite pictures of her are those with my grandfather, trapped in time and in black and white, when she'd slip in the occasional drink, chatting up the issues of the late 1940s, and those even younger still, when she was just a girl with the moxie of legends at her fingertips.

Because I think too often we think mothers are simply defined by motherhood. But they are so much more. They are little girls who dream, young women who live on the edge, who love and break hearts and mend a few broken pieces of their own.

It's fun to think of mothers when the mothering is put down for the night. When the insides come back out. To think of Donna Reed with her feet up on the coffee table, some good music flowing through the living room, a glass of wine in hand. Or sitting out on the back deck with friends, laughing a little too loud for the neighbors. The aprons thrown off, the hair down and screaming at the top of their lungs to an old, favorite song, telling jokes or jumping into a round of bull poker (long story). Of course, those pieces of our moms are always there. We just don't always see them.

Our mothers continue to live outside a simple term. They are our stepmothers – and I'd like mine to know, she has not been forgotten here. And they are our aunts and sisters and daughters and best friends.

I applaud all mothers. I stand in awe of them. I honor them. And most of all I wish them the moments when they melt back into those little girls, who knew the exhilaration of a plie in new ballet shoes, of their first painting or their first home where the silence was all their own. The triumph of their love and everything that goes with it.

They have their own desires, their own sense of fun - dance when no one is looking and all that. As a matter of fact, I consider myself exceptionally lucky - because my mother dances when everybody is looking. And I always think, how I would love to be as brave as that.

What are you waiting for? Call your mother. Take your best friend some flowers. Shoot a twitter to your sister. It's their turn.

he did it

He used to call me "Galakult". Why? I don't freakin' know...but he couldn't say my name.

He loved his pacifier. And when my aunt informed my mother that it was necessary to wean him off it, I hated her for about a year. Because he screamed and cried the entire time.

For a majority of his adolescence - he was busy with his friends and I was busy with mine. We never really meshed. But we fought. We fought hard. We lived in close quarters in a full house and I wasn't always very nice to him. I yelled at him a lot and he'd throw an insult my way from time to time. As most brothers and sisters do.

Something changed as he got older...as he made his way through high school. We were able to joke about the same teachers and he was more involved than I ever was. He was into sports. He had friends that he'd kept since he was young - and I admired him for that.

The first time he got in trouble - real trouble - it was probably blown out of proportion. And he was a combination of pissed and embarrassed because of it. He sat on couch staring at the floor in his crisp blue shirt and tie. Poor kid.

The second time he got in trouble - really got in trouble - he became a legend...with a liking for cigars. In the aficionado way - not the Clinton way. Ew.

We started hanging out. Seeing movies. Joking around. It was a little easier once I'd moved out and there was space between us. But I was more grateful than ever that the space was not as wide as it had been with my older brother, who didn't become a friend until we were both so much older.

And when Brandon died - Kim's little brother, who I'd loved as if he were my own - my own little brother emerged. He hugged me and cared for me and became what he is now. My friend. One of my best friends. Someone I can drink with (even if it bugs me when he's drunk), talk to, lean on and best of all - just be who we are. A brother and a sister.

And as of today - he is no longer a civilian. He's something more. Of course...

I knew that all along.

Congratulations on the Air Force, Dustin. I couldn't be a prouder sister.

weddings and woes

On Sunday, my blinds are closed and it's long after two in the afternoon and I'm still not showered. I am exhausted from the weekend.

The rehearsal for the wedding of two friends (Beth & Bill) was interesting. We all gathered under a relatively hot evening sun at a public park just around the corner from the happy couple's home to practice the walks, the ceremony and all the details in between.

Weddings are a funny thing.

Like an impressive clash of Titans - weddings seem to bring out the beautiful and the grotesque in people. It's all in the danger of the mix. The mix being love and alcohol. Those who have it - show it in those slow dances on the dance floor. And not those cheesy slow dances, like to an 80's hair band ballad - but those classic slow dances - something by Bennett, Fitzgerald or Sinatra. Those who don't - turn to the alcohol and either end up doubled over in a reception hall restroom or someone's back yard. Or worse. I'm proud to say that being one of those who don't have it at the moment - I did not end up doubled over - or drunk for that matter.

But it was a long night. And there was plenty of drama - the details of which I won't go into here - which left Rachel, Brian and I exhausted by the time we pulled into Rachel's drive way at some point after 4 a.m.

I woke up at 2 o'clock in the afternoon on Sunday.

Exhausted as I was, I was in no condition to handle the news that my little brother might be leaving for the Air Force sooner than expected. Like, in two weeks, sooner. I began to cry. And I've been trying to force myself not to think about it all day.

I am no stranger to goodbyes. But Dustin's impending departure is different. He is not just my brother, he is my friend. That is aspect number one. Then there are others. I never thought I'd be here when he left for college a couple of years ago. And I never thought I'd be here when he transferred and came back. And when he told me he was signing up for the service - I hoped I wouldn't be here when he finally took off for boot camp. But here is where I am.

When Rachel called that afternoon, she spoke gently as I cried on the phone. She calmed me down and gave me instructions to get in the shower, get to my grandmother's house - where people were already waiting for me - and reminded me that we had plans for dinner...which always makes for a good time.

And quite frankly - it did.

...And by the way: Congratulations Beth & Bill.

sometimes the journey

Last week, I sat with my Grandmother for a long overdue visit. With a million things ahead of me in the next couple of months, I couldn't stop myself from saying - "Grandma, this summer we're going to start that oral history project." She answered with an enthusiastic 'okay'.

Before I'd even decided to be a writer, my family had said to me that they expected me to write the family book. The book that would tell the millions of stories that passed through dinner conversations, anniversary parties, reunions and chats... The story of my grandparents, their 15 kids, the depression, the civil rights era, the loss, the migration, the wars and everything to follow afterward. Like how three days after my grandparents moved 10 of their children to Israel from Grand Rapids Mi. - they were running for the bomb shelters at the beginning of what would be the Yom Kippur War.

I have an extraordinary family.

So I decided I couldn't afford to waste any more time - and that one day my Grandmother will no longer be with us and all of those stories and their accuracy will be lost forever. So this summer, the taped conversations, sorting through photos and letters, researching geographical histories - all of it will begin. Despite all other goings on. Hopefully it will all lead to a monumental trip next Summer - to Israel. Where it all got interesting. 'Ha shana baya bi yirushalim' - we say every year at Passover. 'Next year in Jerusalem'.

Sometimes the journey just can't wait.

rolling with moses

Tonight, my family rounded out our Passover Seder with Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On".

Because that's how we roll...you know, with Moses.

This weekend, an unfortunate conversation left me reeling about the perception some have of Judaism. To be completely frank about the whole situation, let me first say - I've dealt with prejudices. Growing up attending a private Hebrew school, I watched as swastikas and other Anti Semitic words and symbols had to be professionally washed off our school's building as well as our synagogue's walls. The "Hebrew" on our buses had to be covered during the 1st Gulf War because people felt Israel was responsible for the war to begin with...and they threw rocks at the bus while kids were being taken to school and back.

But I've never been flat out insulted. I've never had someone from another faith stand in front of me and explain to my friends what a Jew is - and that explanation be less than flattering and literally incorrect. I've never had someone judge me for it on an eye level. A 'here I stand, there you are' level. And it pissed me off. And it still pisses me off.

And what really got me - was that I said nothing. To be polite, because I was at my friend's house, I said nothing.

Luckily it was just two days before Passover.

Passover has always been my favorite of the Jewish holidays. Even though I'm forced to go without cereal, pizza, bread and anything else that consists of flour, yeast etc. etc. The ceremonies can be grueling... One year, my older brother and I slept in the back of my parents' station wagon as we drove to New York to celebrate with my Aunt Laraine, who was going according to an Orthodox ceremony. We started mid-afternoon and didn't finish until well after midnight. Somewhere in between, they allowed the children a little break from the formalities...my cousins sat me in front of the television for a viewing of "Cat's Eye". I'm not a cat person.

There's a lot of ground to cover before you can even think about touching the matzo ball soup. The baby in the river, the ten plagues, the Pharaoh's control issues, the splitting of the sea...

Some of the best Passover moments are when everyone is ready for a good song and nobody cares that we're banging on the table so hard that the wine in Elijah's cup is spilling over the edge and onto the table cloth. Others roll like tonight, when we laugh so hard we can barely get through the Haggadah and fill up on so much food - that we can't even properly finish the Seder.

Unlike Hanukkah - which can be compared with Christmas because they both occur around the same time and involve presents - Passover is just for us. Just for Jews. Regardless of the fact that Easter happens around the same time - there's nothing to really compare between the two. There's something comforting about knowing that while everyone else you know is going about their Monday - Jews are stopping to tell a story so important in Jewish history - and they're partying it up with wine and singing and maybe even Marvin Gaye.

You know, depending on how they roll.

my favorite

I could hear her high heels (with an insanely pointy toe) click clack across the tile floor. I was hanging up my coat when she hugged my little brother, her tiny little frame almost disappearing in his broad shouldered, 6' 3 one.

I turned around.

"Ah," she said. "My favorite."

I have a photo on my wall of Darya and I before she left for Israel. I don't know what age I was exactly but I look five. I'm sitting in her lap with a big smile. I wouldn't see her again for years. I'd be twelve or something. Her hair was longer and she looked different. And I was shy and still reeling from divorce and separation and didn't feel quite close to anybody. So I couldn't really feel her when she came back. But I felt it when she left.

A few years back she came to stay for a few months. We'd sit on the porch and smoke cigarettes well into the night, gossiping, talking and laughing so loud that we could be heard in the house. Our laughter sometimes echoed down our quiet, small town street.

After she'd been home for a few days, she took me outside for a smoke and asked me, "Why don't you talk? Inside. You're so quiet." And I told her I didn't feel like anyone would want to hear what I had to say. She asked me questions. The kind that don't normally come up in casual conversation.

"If you were living on your own," she said. "What would you do?"

I thought hard. "I'd have dinners," I answered. "Lots of dinners. The kind where you don't absolutely have to clear the table as soon as everyone is done - because you're in the middle of a good conversation. I'd refill glasses of wine and if the night was going real well - I'd leave the dishes for later." She said she'd decorate. Create a place that looked like her own.

When my grandfather died, she'd found me in the basement sitting at a table with headphones on...listening to Counting Crows and crying. She cupped my face with her hand and smiled and brought me back upstairs. Comforted. When I'd dropped some weight and tanned my skin, she took me out shopping - getting me out of the boy clothes I'd grown up wearing. Confident-ed me. And when we were both drunk on wine - she even got me to dance.

"Oh, I missed you!" she says, hugging me tight. Her voice - and her accent - is soft, smooth and sweet on the tounge. Like frosting.

From across the room we'll catch each other's eye and I'm not just looking at an aunt who loves me dearly. She's my friend who I see all too little.

And when she says her trip is being shortened, leaving after only a few days, I tell myself that I would have been too busy to see her anyway. But the next day on the ride to school...I'll silently cry in the car.

Because my favorite is something you miss when it's not around.

30 is the new 20

When we were young, the game of HORSE was a sensitive matter.

He was competitive. I was so...not. Once I'd gotten an H and an O - I was done. He'd get angry. Eventually he'd offer to pay me a dollar to play the game all the way through. Win or lose. I'd agree. Until the H, the O, the R and the S and I quit. He couldn't stand it.

I could say that it was a noble, sisterly thing. That I just crumbled under the idea that he was the older brother and I submitted to him being better than me in every way. But that wasn't it. I just didn't want to play and didn't want to officially lose.

When we were adolescents it became a battle of the wits. He once tried to explain advanced algebra to me. But I simply didn't compute math. He tried and tried to explain and I repeated and repeated that it didn't matter how he explained it - math was simply a ridiculous notion.

"But if X = 5 and Y = 3," he said. "Then A = 8. That's basic. How do you not get that?"

"I get it," I answered calmly. "But who's to say what X really is? If it's 5 then it should just be 5. Not X. It's stupid."

He raised a dining room chair over his head as if he was going to slam it against the floor.

When we were teenagers - it was a battle of rebellion. I was the rebel. I was the girl who told her Rabbi she was thrilled w/ her parent's divorce and refused to love back the father who didn't love first. So when he tried to rebel, by drinking or staying out with his girlfriend - I didn't do the sisterly thing and keep my mouth shut. I rebelled against his rebelling and tattled.

But when we grew up, both away from home...something happened. He picked me up in Pittsburgh and drove me home for a holiday. He popped in Cd's of bands I'd never heard of and advised me to sleep once we hit Cleveland. He walked around the city with me and I showed him an old record store that he thought was cool. I kept going there after he'd gone home because...well he thought it was cool.

Stationed in Korea, we emailed each other. Nice, long emails. Sisters and brothers don't always talk like that. But friends do. He became my friend. Then he moved back to the states. We started hugging when we saw each other. When I first went to visit him in Phoenix, all of his friends told me how excited he was that I was there. We drove to the Grand Canyon and stood in silence. We hiked up Thunderbird Mountain. We drank Guinness and on a walk through Scottsdale, found a falafel house as out of place as you could imagine in the middle of the Southwest. It became our place. He became one of my best friends.

He's still competitive. He calls when he's sitting in a cafe on Santa Monica Boulevard, sipping on an iced latte and I'm sitting in a Pizza Hut in my small town sipping on iced tea. He leaves messages at 3 a.m. that he was in a bar sitting two tables away from Colin Farrell. He explains in detail the beauty of the 70 degree weather when I'm huddling in below zero temps smoking a cigarette and waiting for my car to warm up.

And when I tease him about growing older today, feeling brittle bones or losing hair - he reminds me that while all the girls who grace Maxim or Cosmo or any other lusty magazine are barely 20 - the men on the cover of GQ or Vanity Fair tend to be in their late 30's or 40's. Thirty, he says, is the new twenty.

He always wins.

surrogates

I don't know what it's like to be married. Or even, for that matter to really have to connect to a significant other's family. I've just never had to do it.

I don't know what it's like, to walk through that front door and shake hands with the mother, small talk with the father or try to superficially bond with the sister or the brother. I can't imagine it being all that comfortable. That is just another aspect to dating and commitment I'd rather keep to a very bare minimum.

When you're single - you still have families that have to mesh. There's the family that brings you up. Remembers what you looked like in diapers. Carry the scars from your temper tantrums and have those embarrassing pictures tucked away in old photo boxes.

Then there's your surrogate family. The people you pick up and collect once you're old enough to recognize that the family you're born to...has limits. Fathers don't always comfort or protect their daughters. Mothers don't always understand the choices of their sons. Brothers and sisters disagree over religion and sex. Cousins secretly compare career paths and progress.

Oh the limits...Eventually you have to realize your family's flaws. The imperfections that will someday mirror your own. Accept theirs as you want them to accept yours - and you'll be forced to move on. To mesh.

We mesh with the people who pop virtually out of nowhere. A Grand Am on a rainy day or a crowded bar in the middle of nowhere. We have the ability to pick and choose our surrogate families. To bring them in to dinner. To take photographs with. To share jokes. To console.

On Saturday, a portion of my two families will have to mesh. There will be plenty of alcohol to go around to ease the pain. Namely - my pain. I'm protective of my surrogate family - because they are the ones that choose to be with you. So I worry they'll be patronized - though my mother assures me there should be no worries. Not with a bottle of wine in tow, that's for sure.

Still, like a set of in-laws, I want my family to like my surrogates. I want them to fall in love with them as much as I have. But the charm of the surrogate is also the drawback. Your friends carry with them all of the intimacies your family will never really know.

t-minus

Forty minutes.

It's finals day today and I've had two anxiety attacks and my stomach is moving like a lava lamp. A bad simile, I know but I'm a little preoccupied right now.

The sad part is that I don't really get all worked up over the tests. I have a paper due today as well, which I worked really hard on not being stressed out over. The professor said it looked fine just as it was, so I played with a few words and cleaned up some citations and kept the over-obsessing to a minimal.

I also don't have test anxiety. I'm of the strong mind that you can only retain and hold what you can retain and hold. I can only study so much. I can only read five books in a single semester, balance a few jobs and a social life and my own neurosis...and remember so much. When it comes down to it - there's no need to over-obsess.

So why am I over-obsessing?

I want the test over with. I want to scribble as fast as my hand will let me and get the hell out of that class room. I want three weeks off. I have two stories due by Friday. I haven't even started them. I want them done. I want to get them done in two days so I can have the rest of the week to do my last minute Hannukah shopping. I don't want everything to take forever and a day to be finished.

Friday, my older brother and I resurrected our Friday night ritual. He calls me from the porch, in his flannel, with a cigar and a glass of scotch - I sit in the back room of the bar and chain smoke. We discuss the aftermath of his recent wedding, how he wants me back in Arizona for a tour of the northern part of the state and the fact that I've been a little bit of a downer for the past few months. When we talk about my options and my future he says, "sounds like it's going to take a lot of 'me' time for you to come to a decision."

Precisely.

I had hopes of filling my three week break from school with another reunion. One with the gym. It's been so long I just might cry when I get to the track. But I worry that I'll be so busy with other things I won't get there. Hannukah is almost here and I still have shopping to do. And this year, Rachel and Mart have asked if they can join in with my family's celebration. I never invite friends to family functions. My family doesn't function well with the outside world - but that is another story entirely. Can't worry about it really, until it happens. But it all can't happen until this damn test is over.

So with a nervous stomach....it's now t-minus 30 minutes.

all others pay cash

Last night driving home from the store and listening to NPR, the radio played a snippet of Jean Sheperd's radio show "Duel in the Snow or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid."

Jean Sheperd is the guy who wrote "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash", the novel that inspired the film "A Christmas Story". It is Sheperd's voice that narrates the movie.

It was cold out, in my opinion it was the first real snow, covering the streets and making them glisten where tires had tread their way through them. The decorations hanging on the lampposts in town blew in the bristly air and twinkle lights always look better in snow.

And the brief clip from the radio show made me smile. Sheperd's voice is nostalgic and warm, like a big wool pea coat. If I could choose anyone to narrate my life, it would be him. Then it wouldn't seem so thick and dramatic but more ironic. Entertaining. Brimming with authenticity.

It's my Christmas Day ritual actually. To watch 24 hours of that movie. Jews have nothing better to do on Christmas anyway. Nothing's open, friends are all busy. So I usually laze about. Baking something so my house smells good, putting on massive amounts of coffee and leaving the TV on even if I'm reading or napping or pretending to read or nap.

If Jean Sheperd narrated my life, I'd insist he talk about how my grandmother's cooking was so good the scent would stick to your clothes...forcing me to change outfits before I'd go out to the bar...causing drunk men to tell me I smelled good. They should really bottle up pot roast and sell it as a perfume. I'd make him talk about waking at 5 a.m. to the smell of onions and garlic and cumin and the sounds of a vacuum, signs that company was coming later that day. My grandmother would make us speak in whispers in the morning when relatives would come to visit - afraid that the sound of us chewing might wake them as they slept snuggled beneath the covers in their beds at the back end of the house.

The best types of memories are always exaggerated. My brothers know about this. Every time the three of us get together the infamous "knee" story, of how I slammed my knee on a block of ice while we were sledding - and later cried about it - is always brought up complete with imitations and whiny voices. I like to exaggerate about the obvious anti-wholesome memories. Like how my father, still hanging on to divorce, wouldn't drop us off at the door of my grandparent's house, but the far end of the driveway. How he took me to breakfast on my birthday at a 24 hour diner and (though it's below the belt because our dog just died a few months ago) how he constantly reminded me that the dog was his best friend in the world and the only one who understood him.

Where was I going with this?

Oh yeah, families, nostalgia, narration... There's not much to narrate now. "Jessica woke up with the least bit of excitement to trudge her way through the snow to school, where she learned absolutely nothing about some pretty influential works of literature and then trudged her way back to work, where her co-worker tortured her with phrases like "hence is the problem".... Sometimes I think I should run my tongue along a metal pole.

You know, just for a little drama.

traditions & tevye

Confession: I totally think Tevye is hot. And not the Harvey Fierstein Tevye. Topol. Topol is hot.

C'mon - in the wedding scene, when he's all dressed in black and trying to calm down the villagers while his friend Perchik tries to get a girl to dance with him? When he's singing "Sunrise Sunset"?! When he's pushing his milk cart and wondering about the state of the world?

Totally hot.

When I got home from my brother's wedding in Arizona, I popped "Fiddler on the Roof" into the DVD player and watched the wedding scene. It's my favorite scene. And that's when I realized that I would totally have married Tevye.

But I digress...

I love the wedding scene in Fiddler on the Roof. I love Jewish weddings period. All weddings morph with time...they're tailored to suit individual tastes and contemporary fashion. But the traditions that surround a Jewish wedding, for some reason, just seem so natural to me. I love things like that. Natural tradition. The signing of the Ketubah, the fact that the bride and groom put their rings on their index finger first - before moving it to the ring finger later. The stepping on the glass. And the dances. The horah, holding hands and moving in a circle around the bride and groom. Lifting them into the air on chairs. The "Mazal Tov" of it all...

As we made the rounds on the military base we stayed at on Monday, picking up and dropping off and packing for our flight back - F16's echoed in the distance. Their engines ripped through the cloudless blue sky with the sound of speed and movement...and I didn't want to go home.

When I'm in Arizona, the vastness of the land is what begs me to stay. It's a reminder that the world is everlasting and not simply what fits within the confines of a small town. It reminds me that problems lie in a great big world and not just on the narrow bridge of our shoulders - making them a little easier to bare. I miss the mountains when I'm not in Arizona. And the air. And that sky that goes on forever.

I've been trying to figure out how to write about the drama, the issues and the tireless self-introspection that came with the trip. I was in a bad place when I landed and I spend most of my time with the groomsmen who watched nonstop football, drank nonstop bud light and left some of the worst scents behind them in the rental car. It's also hard to write when you're not really...in it. Since I got home things have been hectic and stressful - much like when I left. I'm in the midst of trying to save my 4.0 GPA and drop a class and work hasn't been easy to fall back into. It sounds so tedious and self-involved. And it is. And that's why I don't want to talk about it right now. It's all in my journal - I'll post from it later.

I snapped 211 pictures at my brother's wedding. And flipping through them after the wedding back in my room on base, I found this one of my brother and new sister-in-law. All the crap that I carried with me through the weekend melted away. I could feel my brother's hug, his wife grabbing me by the arm and declaring she had a sister-in-law and the even littler things I found in my relatives that I recognized in myself. Laughs and habits and personality traits.

And everything else will come in time. Things still aren't easy at home....but the thing is - while the rest of the world went on - we gathered in a small corner of the world and celebrated my brother and his wife. And nothing should ever get in the way of that

So here is to traditions and Tevye. And to my brother & sister-in-law. And to the state of Arizona - which keeps asking me to dance.