The tem­ple we attended when I was grow­ing up had a really fan­tas­tic crazy-modern vibe; I keep mean­ing to drive Ryan by some Sat­ur­day when we’re out run­ning errands and I always for­get about it. Today I was in hot pur­suit of a place to read another chap­ter in my psy­chol­ogy book (they are get­ting longer, I swear) and I hap­pened to drive by.

THE WHOLE DAMN THING IS GONE.

I knew there was some fuss about the build­ing itself and preser­va­tion types were argu­ing for its impor­tance and oth­ers said it was hideous and then there’s the fact that the con­gre­ga­tion up and moved itself 10 miles south. But still. OK, it hasn’t been razed; there’s a school in its place. But you’d never know what the old build­ing looked like and I can only think that this is so “they paved par­adise and put up a park­ing lot.”

Here’s a link to a photo–isn’t it awesome?

I am, to put it mildly, a picky bitch.

So, once upon a time, I worked in the home depart­ment of a bridal mag­a­zine. This instilled in me a deep love and appre­ci­a­tion for china and fine crys­tal. As I was 21 at the time, I did not do much with this knowl­edge except think, “Some day, this will be use­ful.” Now, upon the dis­cov­ery that Mottahedeh’s Tobacco Leaf pat­tern is a whop­ping $500 per place set­ting, I have been issued an aes­thetic chal­lenge of sorts. I am not going to ask any­one to buy us some­thing that costs $500. And there are plenty more awfully lovely china pat­terns out there. How­ever, here in the some­times style-depleted city in which I reside, there is nowhere to gather all of these pat­terns side by side and choose among them. Or to decide to get a salad plate in one pat­tern and a din­ner plate in another. You get the idea.

If I had chinapatterndatabase.com, though, think of the fun!

Also, in search­ing for poten­tial flat­ware, I think I have real­ized that the only one I like thus far is the same one my par­ents use, Dansk’s slim and util­i­tar­ian Vari­a­tion V. I had a brief flir­ta­tion with Torun, but Ryan says “no” on rounded ends.

For proof that I was once inter­ested in things besides my big fat half-Jewish wed­ding, feel free to peruse the old days of me here.

So we’re engaged! I have had my taste of wed­ding plan­ning for, let’s see, about a week now, and I have been through the seven stages of grief already. None of it had any­thing to do with Ryan (thank God) or my fam­ily (hur­rah) or even his fam­ily (whew) but still, my crazy is bub­bling up to the sur­face and it is wholly self-generated.

We want a venue where we can have both the cer­e­mony and the recep­tion, prefer­ably down­town with a sky­line view, and some place with a full kitchen that will let us pro­vide our own caterer. Already that knocks a lot of poten­tial spaces off of the list. We went to see Poten­tial Space #1 on Fri­day and fell for it hard and fast. It’s unfor­tu­nately booked through the end of the year on Sat­ur­days. So we thought, “No prob­lem. We’ll get mar­ried on a Fri­day night.”

Then I started look­ing at Jew­ish cal­en­dars, to make sure that we wouldn’t be get­ting mar­ried on, say, Yom Kip­pur, and learned (duh!) that rab­bis don’t marry cou­ples on Shab­bat. Well, crap. This sent me into a spir­i­tual tail­spin of sorts. Fine, I’m a half-assed Jew, but I still want a rabbi to marry us.

Which brings me to another matter–no one else really cares about the rabbi. Ryan: an athe­ist. My par­ents: would hire an Elvis imper­son­ator if need be. Ryan’s fam­ily: are just happy he’s mar­ry­ing. So maybe the solu­tion is to have a pri­vate, parents-and-anyone-else-who-cares cer­e­mony on a week­day evening, and then have the party/reception as planned on a Fri­day night. Would you care if you didn’t see your friend get mar­ried, or does it really matter?

Who didn’t buy tick­ets the day they went on sale for the pair of Shins’ shows tonight and tomor­row? Who thought to her­self, “Two shows? That’s crazy!”? Who tried to buy tick­ets online a few weeks ago, found both shows sold out, fig­ured she could buy tick­ets on craigslist and then real­ized she was being priced out of a concert?

Who will spare you the whole old-person-who-likes-indie-rock-and-wants-a-band-she-likes-to-be-able-to-eat-but-would-like-to-see them-without-a-big-hassle whine and moan?

Some­one linked to this arti­cle some­where about South­ern Indian cui­sine and read­ing it took me back imme­di­ately to morn­ings spent drink­ing Dixie cups of per­fect sweet cof­fee and evenings eat­ing off of banana leaves. I think I need to start scan­ning my India photos.

Tell peo­ple your only mar­ketable skill is writ­ing, they tell you to write a book.

No.

You tell one of those insane peo­ple who sug­gests you write a book that the only book you’re going to write is going to be about not writing.

He says, “I’d read that.”

Oth­ers agree.

You think back over your non-illustrious career, how oth­ers have not asked your advice, and you think…

Step 1: Begin your day giv­ing into any whim that strikes you, as long as it’s not writ­ing. You want to scrub your floors, tell off tele­mar­keters, watch a season’s worth of “Dr. Phil”? As long as it doesn’t involve pen touch­ing paper, go on with your bad self.

Back in the day, I had a lot of flashes of bril­liance for mag­a­zines that I could start. One night, per­haps aided by a case of beer or well vodka, Boris and I founded Weak magazine–for the neb­bish and mal­nour­ished. Because I’m crazy and take notes even in altered states, I still have a pretty good out­line of the mag­a­zine: we envi­sioned it as an anti-lad’s mag, sort of the response to Maxim and the like (remem­ber, this was the late nineties), but the title was also a nod (or maybe a chin thrust, who knows?) to Dave Eggers’ Might. All of this, in the spirit of our proud lack of self-esteem, added up to a mag­a­zine that stood up for the lit­tle guy, with a healthy dose of intel­lec­tu­al­ism and the lit­er­ary spirit that had made Esquire and the like hot spots for fic­tion in the fifties and sixties.

We came up with slugs: the FOB would be So Low. There’d be a Cook­ing for One recipe. Sports cov­er­age would go under Los­ing Streak. Enter­tain­ment Cov­er­age? Entertainment–Weakly. We envi­sioned a crush page on some­one almost-attainable that we’d call Weak-Kneed. We actu­ally had too many great names for a porn roundup: Hand Solo? Talk to the Hand? Aloha, Mr. Hand? The back­page, we thought, should focus on good moments for the weak, ergo: The Weak Shall Inherit the Earth.

We had a run­ning list of “weak peo­ple” to inter­view, though look­ing over that list now, some of them are dis­qual­i­fied, like, um, Screech.

Any­way. I won­der if maybe we’d been just a few years younger, with blog­ging tem­plates made read­ily avail­able, would we have gone home that night and thrown our ideas up online instead of talk­ing about them? Or would Weak still exist as an imag­i­nary mag­a­zine, one com­plete with t-shirts and poten­tial writ­ers, never to take shape?

Mike Mills’ new book

Travel back with me, friends, to New York in the early ‘90s. The inter­net was used for email­ing and alt.something news­groups. (OK, maybe not for you, Al Gore, you were blog­ging or cre­at­ing Ama­zon. Me, I was post­ing to the Pave­ment fan list and email­ing. That’s all.)

Record and comic book and zine stores: a hand­ful. In other words, to stay up on non-mainstream media, you could take a walk around lower Man­hat­tan for a few hours, have a cou­ple con­ver­sa­tions, flip through your pre­ferred pub­li­ca­tions and feel pretty secure in your aware­ness of what was hap­pen­ing via CD, seven inch, etc.

I made this split pea and parsnip soup last night that was so vile-looking. Luck­ily, Ryan thought the same thing I did and when I said, “You know what this reminds me of?” he said, “The sludge in Bet­ter Off Dead?”

I thought for sure that had to be on YouTube but no dice. YouTu­bers with a copy of the movie, bring the sludge to the people!

You know who is on the ‘Tube, though? Our new friend Gilad. I am a woman with­out a gym mem­ber­ship, in a land of snow and ice and lazi­ness, yet I have dis­cov­ered the world of tele­vised fit­ness shows and…I am a con­vert. I know it sounds ter­ri­bly dorky, but I totally got my Denise Austin on yes­ter­day and then Ryan came home for some Gilad action and I don’t know if we stuck it out because we enjoyed the work­out or because we liked how we bossed us around. He says “NICE” in his tough-stuff voice a lot, yet he remains very sup­port­ive. I think we’re in love.

Busty Exer­ciser on Fit TV’s “Gilad”