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From 0 to 60 to 30,000 feet, I’m back at 0. Back to the standard yellow alert that keeps me on edge, but not frantic. Back to normal.

But somehow, normal seems nowhere near as normal as I remembered. I don’t know what I was expecting, but hometown doldrums are unaltered by departures and arrivals, by endless terminals that in name alone sound deadly, by points of origin and destinations that seem extremely different at journey’s start than they do after all the mileage has been accrued. It’s a short trip from optimism to pessimism, from elation to deflation. And during the trip entire, I’m still just me. As far as I’ve traveled, I’ve returned to a circumstance unaltered by my experiences.

Still, it’s a journey. I pass through insecurity, a checkpoint I am all too used to. Unshoeing myself, I feel my socks, the protectors of my tender toes, slip on shiny, happy linoleum. My footing unstable, I wonder if metal detectors can detect the slow, metallic hardening of a human heart. I dismiss the melodrama and put my shoes back on.

Dragging a suitcase, now with only one wheel functioning, I wondered: did my bag travel on hope, with optimism contained just within a zipped compartment? Or was it despair that kept my carry-on rolling on, in the knowledge that to stop would result in paralysis?

Then, the answer: hope and despair are too closely connected to separate. They are conjoined twins; one will die without the other. And that’s why distance can make you sad and proximity can make you sadder: because the closer you are, the more your heart feels the once and future distance.

In a wireless lounge, hope rebooted leads to some endless area of the undeveloped internet, where I am lost in the land of 404-filenotfounds of missed connections and opportunities. I can’t explain it away, argue it out of existence in front of a jury of my fears. I’m judge and defendant and prosecutor. Interpretation and reinterpretation are the soul purview of self, and the burden of justice weighs heavily.

It’s not just about him. Undoubtedly, the rawer, recent part of it is. But part of it is residual,–the infectious, previously latent remnants of the other disappointments that litter my mind, the other potentials who never actualized, never became anything of substance. Not fair to make him the lightning rod for decades’ disappointment; still I feared his reaction like terrorism. Somehow I knew that unspoken, my meaning would sweep by him as airborne intangible; he’d judge the longing as irrational, nonspecific and dismissable–even amid protestations of my greatness, dismissing me in the process.

Compared to war, hunger, crime, poverty, suffering, death…I know this disappointment is a luxurious indulgence, my grief only a whisper of a truer heartbreak: my caught breath and swallowed tears are hyberbolic nothing. But there’s no pretending that the sadness doesn’t go deep. Deeper than canyons seen from airplanes or betrayal or deceit or chasms of misunderstanding or relationships you overimagined.

Back then, I took in the ambiguity willfully, like clichés, or carbon monoxide. Part of me preferred to live with a desperate unstable hope in ambiguous silence. While uncertainty is torturous immobility, it also preserves possibility. In immobility, new wounds cannot be inflicted: past stays past, potential seems horizon-limitless, and futures seem more hopeful.

Instead, I seized the reins, demanded truth. Received my certainty with a side of heartbreak. Here, where I am now, feels like a place of impossible and insatiable thirst—tired and irritable, I’m parched for contact. In some moments, hairline fractures in my heart belabor vital breath and it feels like I’m eroding.

Now, having never begun, it’s over. Lesson learned: that if you ask for nothing you get nothing. But sometimes, even when you ask, you still get nothing.

Well, most of you already know about My Secret Yeshiva Prom. (Which, I guess, means it ain’t a secret no more.) But although the event itself was a little underground, I’m pretty sure that everyone’s date was Jewish.

But according to this article in the Jewish Week, a Westchester area Solomon Schechter school (Conservative) announced that students would only be allowed to bring dates who were Jewish:

While the school saw the directive as a way to stave off interfaith dating, Bertrand [a student whose father was Catholic when her parents married] and other students at the Hartsdale school said it encouraged creating a “self-imposed ghetto” that could generate resentment and even stoke the flames of anti-Semitism. “It was intended to promote Jewish continuity, but instead it insults non-Jews, it insults Solomon Schechter students, and it doesn’t reflect well on the school,” Bertrand said of the Jewish-only prom policy, which remains in place today. Worse, she said, the decree might inadvertently prove racist. “Most people can pass as Jewish,” said Bertrand, now 18, noting that school officials would be hard pressed to determine at the door who was Jewish. “If the school was going to investigate students they suspected brought non-Jewish dates, the only red flag would be if someone was another race.”

And I was worried about bringing someone Conservative to my underground yeshiva prom…

Renatt Brodsky, a fellow freelancer, is working on an upcoming Glamour story titled, “Hate at first sight” – It’s about women and how they ended up falling for “that jerk!.”

She writes:

I need quotes from women in their TWENTIES about their personal experiences with a guy who did something so unbelievable that they just can’t believe they wanted to see him again and give him another chance. Like… insulted her, called her fat, vomited on her, tripped her, accidentally set her hair on fire… you get the picture.

Here are some good examples:

“I thought RD’s accent sounded just like Forest Gump when I first met him at a work event,
and he was everything I swore I would never date–he was a hunter, drove a pickup truck, and liked chicken-fried steak. Still, I thought he was cute and a few days later we were emailing and talking on the phone. Because I didn’t write him off, I found out that he was witty and smart. And even though my gastronomical parents are horrified, six years later, I actually like
chicken-fried steak.” – Marcy John, 26, Dallas, Texas

“I met this guy on vacation in Cabo San Lucas. He was acting like a total frat boy–talking really
loud and telling jokes that weren’t funny. Then he bought me a beer and spilled it on me! After the trip, we reconnected again back home in San Francisco over email (he was on an email list of people I met on the trip), and a few days later I reluctantly invited him to dinner with some friends. Everyone thought he was so great and said I was crazy if I didn’t go on a date with him. It turned out, though, that away from the beer and the bar, he was charming and down to
earth. Forget Mexico, he turned out to be the great treasure of San Francisco.”
-Michelle Marlin 29, San Francisco, California

If you have a great anecdote about a jerk you lusted after again and again–please email me the
following information by Wednesday, June 8 2005, 9 a.m.
1. first and last name
2. age
3. city, state
4. email
5. number
6. your quote.

Please email her with any questions, and tell her you found out about it from Esther, from JDatersAnonymous…

…to disappointment:

1) Cry. It’s all right to cry. Crying takes the sad out of you. OK, so it doesn’t. But it still beats holding it in for years and having it surface during an NBC re-airing of Titanic.

2) Phone a friend. Important to have someone there to counter the self-deprecation and negativity that you’ll undoubtedly hurl at yourself. Also important to make sure that you’re not alone when you…

3) Find glass, add ice, pour Jack Daniels into glass. Consider adding Diet Coke, but you only have caffeinated and you don’t want your elixir to keep you up all night.

4) Turn off all instant messengers and screen your phonecalls. Make outgoing calls to female friends only; male friends who are married are okay to call too. But do not call or otherwise communicate with single male “friends.” You don’t want to drink-and-dial (or imbibe-and-IM) when you’re in this state of mind. This way, madness lies.

5) Go to bed earlyish, and realize that you haven’t been to sleep before midnight in months. Resolve to get more sleep in the future, even as you know you’re swearing oaths to yourself that you’ll never keep. As you fall asleep, listen to music that contains a soothing rhythm, soaring passion, and a subtle melancholy.

6) Wake to find yourself in possession of two empty boxes of tissues, two puffy eyes and one big headache, which you decide to address by the name of Mr. Daniels. Promise yourself that yesterday’s frustration will fuel today’s workout, and load up the MP3 player with blisteringly popalicious Top 40 tunes mixed with old school heavy metal.

7) Go through the motions, even as you realize that there’s still lots to work out, and that only time, if anything, will remove the splinters of pain and disappointment from the soft undersides of your feet. You know that every step will hurt until it doesn’t. Buy insoles. Cover nascent blisters with band-aids. But do everything in your power to keep walking.