The song that's stuck in my head this weekend

Total candy. I love it.

Additive properties

During a spare moment in chem class, I did a few simple equations and discovered that I spent roughly two-thirds of the '00s in relationships. The percentage surprised me a bit, and I started wondering whether a higher single-to-coupled ratio would be healthier.

Like other people I've known over the years, including some of the women I've dated, I prefer not to be single. But maybe deciding to be single for a while would be a good thing. I know someone who strung together five two-year relationships (= 10 years of being somebody's girlfriend) from the middle of high school until well after college, starting a new one whenever an old one ended, like a chain smoker. Finally, after boyfriend #5 fizzled out, she went on a relationship "fast," and the experience was positive. She realized she could survive on her own.

The yearning to find a partner is, of course, a natural one, especially for someone who's almost 31. But the "why" of that yearning -- to escape loneliness, to feel desired and therefore desirable, to bolster flagging self-esteem -- is where the problem often lies. My determination to get regular exercise and lose weight is partly about wanting to feel comfortable in my own body, and thus confident enough to enter a relationship for the right reasons -- or at least fewer wrong ones. It might also make dating a little less nervewracking.

Abnormal psychology

I've written here about my struggles with depression and disordered eating, but not so much about my obsessive-compulsive tendencies. They've died down a bit since I went on Lexapro more than a year ago, but I still find myself battling irrational cause-effect relationships in my mind. It's not "If I lend this camera to my friend for the night, he'll break it," but instead: "If I lend this camera to my friend for the night, I'll be unable to stop worrying about whether he'll break it and thus my work will suffer." It's a step removed from actually not trusting the friend.

It's not (usually) that I'm an ungenerous person, it's that I let my neurosis hijack my behavior and prevent me from being as giving as I want to be. (And yes, I'm the one letting this happen. I'm getting better at fighting what I call "pre-worry" or "meta-worry" -- worrying compulsively that I'll worry -- but I still have a ways to go.) Sometimes it's hard for me to separate my mind's obsessive-compulsive "reasoning" from valid logic or meaningful emotion. It's the same problem I've long had with ambient noise, a big pet peeve of mine.

Sometimes I have reason to complain about noise (i.e., a "normal" person would), while at other times I'm unusually sensitive to unwanted sounds (a "normal" person wouldn't be upset, but I am). Figuring out the boundary between reasonable and unreasonable discomfort remains tricky for me, though again, I'm improving. Using earplugs, which I began doing when I moved to the Kibbutz in August of 2008, has been a minor revelation. How did I survive without them all those years? How much tension could they have relieved when I was in high school and college?

I don't have a lot more to say about this at the moment, except that I've gotten better at making decisions, and not whipping myself into a total neurotic lather in the process, since starting therapy in late 2005. I'm grateful to have somewhere to go each week -- or every couple weeks, now that I'm in a money crunch -- where I can decompress, talk through my issues du jour, and realize how much stress I carry around. I still prescribe exercise and meditation for my problems, but I'm having a devil of a time getting myself to fill the prescription.

R.I.P., Eileen

Earlier today, I found an obituary from February that listed a friend I'd lost touch with: Eileen Mintz, whose passion for food matched her formidable PR skills. I met her through my work as a food writer for Seattle Weekly, but she was more than just a professional acquaintance. Even though we didn't see each other too often, her kindness to me resembled that of a loving aunt, albeit one with better connections and juicier gossip than any actual relative I've ever had. Eileen was a matchmaker, too, and though she never made any money at it, she probably could have.

I interviewed her about her knack for pairing people up for the Weekly's Valentine's Day issue in 2006, and the resulting piece provides a sample of Eileen's offhand wisdom and joie de vivre. After the interview, she drove me to the house of Emily Cunningham, whom I'd just started dating. That very night, Emily and I began a relationship that would last two and a half years. Coincidence? Doubtful. Befriending a matchmaker gives you an unfair advantage in matters romantic; I highly recommend it.

Wherever you are, Eileen, I hope you're eating well and helping people date better. I'm really sorry I missed your memorial service.

Problems of privilege

As the years pass, I empathize more and more with what Sasha expressed in a recent post. The following passage feels especially relevant:

I recall back in my days as an engineering student, sitting in the lab chatting with a young female classmate from India. She was telling me about the men her parents were considering having her marry. I was aghast.

“Your parents are choosing your husband?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s how we’ve always done it.”

“But don’t you want some say in it? Doesn’t that seem horribly unfair?”

She laughed. “I watch you American girls and your dating. You are always so unhappy. It sounds terrible. I don’t want that.”

I’m almost envious of the days when women had no options, no careers and arranged marriages. I see the insanity in that, but I don’t feel it. I’m tired of options. I’m exhausted from heartbreak and doubt and risk-taking and failure and maybes. I just want to see the path I’m on, get a copy of the maze with the solution on the back.

It's a helluva town

At the beginning of 2005, I knew I wanted to move to New York. I applied for a job at the Village Voice (nothing came of it), and I talked fairly frequently about my intention to check the place out and, if my experience justified my excitement, pick up and go. I visited the city in October of 2005, and it wasn't long before I was smitten. I saw college friends, high school friends, Central Park, Brooklyn, the West Village, and on and on. I called my friend Judith one afternoon and told her: "I'm moving here!" I was very excited.

I left Seattle Weekly in February of 2006, and my immediate plan was to divvy up my stuff into three piles: stuff to sell, stuff to pack, and stuff to ship. I hadn't counted on meeting Emily the month before I quit at the Weekly and starting a relationship that would last into the spring of 2008, but after much soul-searching, I decided to move anyway. I flew from Seattle to New York on April 1, 2006; my half-joking, somewhat superstitious logic was that if it didn't work out, I could always claim the entire move had been an elaborate April Fool's prank.

As it turned out, I took to New York like a bear to honey. I spent the first month in a brownstone with Michael and another guy, and my energy went mostly into looking for a more permanent place to live (after a month, I had to be out of that brownstone) and, of course, a job. The latter came to me via my college friend Miranda, who worked at Global Health Strategies, one of whose principals had recently suffered a herniated disc. I became his personal assistant, and over the next few months I went from fetching vegetable juice and running mundane errands to doing vaccine-related research at the company's Chelsea office. In addition to the job, I joined a softball team, went to a weekly meditation class, worked out at the Y, and had a busy social life. I felt happier than I had in a long time; New York was doing its job.

I was still with Emily, though, and eventually it became clear to us that we didn't want our relationship to end. She wasn't ready to drop her Seattle life and move to New York, and I wasn't willing to lose her, so I made plans to move back in September, right after my friend Jordan's wedding. I remember an August trip to Coney Island that seemed magical: I went alone, rode the Ferris wheel, drove a bumper car, and watched the Friday night fireworks on the beach. I thought to myself: How can I leave this place? My mother used to say that it's a lucky thing when leaving a place hurts, because that means it meant something to you. If that's true, I was a pretty lucky fellow when I left New York.

Readjusting to Seattle took some time. Am I really back here again? was my initial response; I'd wanted to leave so badly that being back seemed sightly surreal. I worked at University Book Store for six months, but retail is decidedly not for me, so when my friend Gary let me know about a copyediting job at NWsource.com, I took immediate action. I ended up working at NWsource for a full year (almost exactly), and I made some wonderful friends there, including my boss and my fellow writers and editors. When I left NWsource in May of 2008, my plan was to move east, either to New York or to an intentional community in Massachusetts.

By now, Emily and I were more or less broken up, but somehow going back to New York didn't feel right. It felt, instead, like a knee-jerk response, a bit of old logic that might no longer hold true. "Well, that didn't work out; guess I'll just go back to New York." That wasn't the spirit in which I wanted to return, and my resolve was accordingly weaker as I began to sell off and pack up my stuff yet again. I'd moved across the country twice in less than half a year in 2006, and all that moving had taken its toll. I only wanted to leave Seattle if there was a very good reason to do so, even though I couldn't articulate that; I still felt trapped here, and convinced that only a geographic fix would help me move on after the breakup. Fate had other plans for me, though: Emily's bike accident in July of 2008 gave me a reason to stick around for a while longer, and while I did I discovered the Ravenna Kibbutz. The rest, as they say, is history.

I mention all of this because my most recent trip to New York, which I returned from less than a week ago, helped clarify things a bit. Visiting in January turned out to be a good idea; it's hard to know what New York in the dead of winter is like unless you experience it firsthand, and I'd only been there in spring, summer, and fall. I went back to my old neighborhood in Brooklyn and didn't feel too much; the magic of the place was closely connected to my state of mind in the spring and summer of 2006, and that time had passed. I liked walking around Manhattan, but I noticed that the hustle and bustle, and the many challenges of life in a giant city like New York, would make a return stressful as well as rewarding.

I never set up a financially sustainable life for myself in 2006, and to do so now, in our dire economy, I'd have to work even harder than I would have had to back then. I do have many friends in New York, including a couple of really good ones, but I have so many friends in Seattle that I'd be losing at least as much as I'd be gaining by moving. It would be a bittersweet trade-off rather than the decidedly joyous experience I had in 2006 (though it would have been less joyous had Emily and I actually broken up when I left Seattle).

When I think of New York today, I don't see it as my inevitable destination. I'm still not sure I want to stay in Seattle for good, but my life here has improved in the last few months. I've settled into Kibbutz life and appreciate both my housemates and the many wonderful members of the community we continue to nurture and expand, and I'm enjoying my new job at Childhaven as well as the freelance writing I'm doing for Jew-ish.com. My 30th birthday is approaching, and while it's hard to completely shake the restlessness of my twenties, I feel a little less troubled by the notion of living in Seattle for a while longer.

When Emily and I dated, we both thought of New York as a rival girlfriend, an entity I loved that could keep us apart. Now I see the city as a former flame I may want to be just friends with. Maybe time and circumstance will rekindle our romance in the future, but I'm not as intent on making that happen as I used to be. Earlier today, an idea popped into my head as I thought about my recent stay in New York and the understanding it imparted: There's what we know and what we can't possibly know, and leveraging the former against the latter might be the key to a fulfilling life. I can't possibly know precisely what my future will entail, or where life will take me, geographically or otherwise, but it's nice to know a little more about what New York means to me, and what it doesn't.

Where love and letter tiles collide

Now that I'm single and addicted to Scrabulous, this article seems apt.

Home again from Harborview

It's been quite a pair of weeks. Yesterday, Emily was released from Harborview for the second time in just under two weeks. She was re-hospitalized because she was experiencing nausea and disorientation, which was eventually determined to be the result of a sodium/water imbalance that can, in turn, stem from injury to the part of the brain that regulates such things. Starting a week ago, I began pulling the "night shift," coming in each evening and staying the night in a chair-bed in Emily's room. I ate breakfast each morning in the cafeteria, which has a surprisingly robust bagel selection and some pretty good bran muffins, too (and hemp milk!), and tended to head home around 11 a.m. Emily's mom arrived each morning and stayed through the day, while I rested and caught up on various and sundry errands. (And played switchboard for a lot of Emily-related calls from her friends and Co-Counselors.) Now she's home and resting comfortably. She goes in on Monday for a chat with a kidney doctor, I think, and is scheduled for Tuesday hand surgery. I'll spend Tuesday night at the hospital again. If anybody has recipes to suggest that might effectively soothe a convalescing friend, please submit them here, or just give me a call.

Ah, Harborview. Packed with fascinating stories, and me without a little notebook in which to record them! I met a 47-year-old hard-rock vocalist (who looked to be in his thirties) and his 26-year-old girlfriend -- they met in Anchorage at a karaoke bar, and she picked up him, expecting nothing more than a one-night stand. More than two years later, they're still together, and they seem like a good couple. (I'd reveal the malady that landed her at the hospital, but I'm trying not to overdo it with the identifying details.) I also met a woman who was in for a virus in her spine (no, not meningitis -- I asked) and had been at the hospital for five weeks. She was bored and occasionally hallucinated, most often at night. Rumor had it she'd "seen" her Pomeranian outside her (fourth-floor) window at least once. There were a few cases sadder than these that I won't get into; suffice it to say the experience was an education in human nature and behavior, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I'll likely be in a position to make social plans again pretty soon, now that Emily's hospital time seems to be nearing its end. I'm also rethinking my long-standing plan to leave town this summer; I'm finding it harder than expected to do, and I'm beginning to wonder whether my resistance means something more than simply fear of leaving my comfort zone, the place I've lived for more than a fifth of my life. Maybe I have some unfinished business here. More as I figure it out. Right now I need to get some much-needed rest.

More odds and ends

Though described by Greg as "no Grey Album," Amplive's hip-hop Radiohead remixes still seem worth a listen.

Not into remixes? Perhaps you'll enjoy these mashups.

In Juno news: That sound you hear is a collective sigh of relief.

In anticipation of the new Michel Gondry movie, Be Kind Rewind (which looks extremely sweet and fun), here's a "sweded" cover of The Wedding Singer, featuring yours truly:


Expect the film to usher in an absolute deluge of "sweded" movies on YouTube. This, Cloverfield, and Diary of the Dead (which I wish I wasn't way too squeamish to see) are already shaping up as this year's YouTube-savvy cinematic trifecta.

Speaking of "sweding," this is what pinball looks like when it's "sweded."

In (belated) honor of Valentine's Day, here's a pretty good article about marriage from MSN.

Finally, here's more on the Milkshake Phenomenon. Drink up!