Over the past month or so, I’ve gotten a little obsessed with style blogs, especially those written by academics or freelancers. You know how sometimes you get interested in something, or hungry for some particular food, and it feels like a whim — “You know, I never really knew what the Holy Roman Empire actually was, let me Wikipedia that,” or “Dang, pretzels would be good right now.” And then sometimes it feels like a need, as though your body or mind are suffering some kind of deficiency that needs to be made up.

This one felt more like a need, and I was wondering what was up with that.

To an extent, it clearly had to do with the fact that I haven’t gotten out much in December and January — in December, I had to cancel almost all my social plans due to illness, and I’m still trying to figure out how social life works when you can’t drink and more or less can’t eat, either. (Any local readers know a hip Cambridge joint that specializes in steel-cut oatmeal and herbal tea? Didn’t think so.) So a bit of it was compensatory for my lack of a social life — if I couldn’t go out, I could at least get inspiration from style blogs and put some fun outfits together for when I could.

But the fact that I was focusing so much on the writers and academics, and their work wardrobes, was my real clue to what was going on.

I think this is the resolution I make every New Year — Jewish and Gregorian and school and fiscal and anything else — concentrate. Work when I am working, play when I am playing. It’s hard, isn’t it, for those of us who work on the computer? I’m not saying I even want to work more, or harder, or whatever. Just that when I’m writing, I should write (and not shop for cardigans on eBay), and when I am done working, there should be no vague guilt or occasional checking of e-mail.

Anyway, this is why, I think, I’ve been so interested in style blogs by academics and writers and other people for whom work and life and play and duty get blurry around the edges. Because one way you can define those edges is through how you dress. And when you’re a freelancer, you need all the help you can get. (Oh, all right, I am writing this in my bathrobe, okay?)

So one of my new — not resolutions, but practices — is to get dressed and get out more in order to do my work. I live in a city rich with coffee shops and libraries, and ought to take more advantage of them. I’m suspecting this will help my productivity and my mood (writers, academics, at-home parents, and other home-employed people — you know that dazed, almost jet-lagged feeling when the sun goes down and you realize you haven’t been out of the house all day? Hate that!) as well as the local economy.

Off to choose an outfit!

… is that what we’ve decided the last decade should be called? If so, the Oughts were, for me, the Dids. During the past ten years, I

- Met and married Mr. Improbable
- Got my PhD
- Converted to Judaism
- Taught college for two years
- Started writing the Miss Conduct column, and eventually two blogs
- Wrote my first book

… along with various other life-transition experiences, like starting to travel overseas and getting a dog.

That list isn’t meant to be “ooh, haven’t I accomplished an impressive lot,” but as evidence of what a huge decade of transition the 00s were for me. According to psychologists who study adult development, we spend about half our adult life in periods of transition. Sometimes it can be hard to know when you’re in one of those phases — maybe you don’t realize you’re in transition until you’ve already made the change.

What are you doing when you’re not in transition? Building on what you’ve got. Which is how I’m feeling at the moment: all the major pieces in my life are in place. Now it’s up to me to do something with them, to start husbanding and growing my resources.

I don’t ever recall before having a calendar decade match so closely with a personal turning point (which is probably why I got such a kick out of that post by the blogger who was born in a year ending in zero) before. Have you? How were the Oughts for you?

I have a terrible sinus headache, my favorite pair of sunglasses broke, Milo behaved like a mad feral thing on his walk, and it turns out the new software on my boston.com blog doesn’t enable me to do the thing I thought it would.

It is, in short, one of those days, so I thought I would share a little faux pas story with you. As many of you know, Eddie Izzard is my favorite comedian. Our landlord and his girlfriend had extra tickets to the Izzard concert Tuesday night, and invited us to join them for that and a potluck dinner beforehand. To which I brought one of my brand-new vegetarian recipes … topped with pine nuts, to which our landlord’s girlfriend’s son has a near-fatal allergy.

Because that’s how Miss Conduct repays generosity and hospitality!

Oy.

Last week we talked about the stereotype that people with a limited diet are boring neophobes, and how wrong that view is. Unexpectedly, although my diet is now restricted, I’ve been experiencing it as a broadening of my food world, of learning new cuisines and cooking techniques. My ingredients are constrained, but not my imagination.

And you notice things. For example, I’ve started eating steel-cut oatmeal every morning. I think the John McCann oatmeal tin is a thing of beauty.

Note the “Certificate of Uniformity of Granulation” on the back, attested to by not one but three officials: men, bureaucrats yet, who literally felt their oats.

See the granules in question after the jump!

Christmas was quite delightful this year (the belatedness of the annual Mystery Milo notwithstanding). We had a good group of folks with us, and “Sherlock Holmes” certainly didn’t disappoint as far as holiday escapism, and the uncanny desirability of Robert Downey Jr., were concerned.

The only part that made me slightly unhappy was when we went to Changsho for dinner afterward. We got the big table with the lazy susan — does anything speak of joy and inclusiveness more than the big table with the lazy susan in a Chinese restaurant, I ask you — and sure enough, I was That Person who had to take her entree off the lazy susan and hoard it to herself, because I couldn’t share what anyone else had ordered.

I’m going to be That Person for a while, it seems. Essentially, there is more bad acid floating around in my gastrointestinal system than at a Grateful Dead tribute band concert, and I need to change a lot of eating habits fast. After a couple of months, when things calm down, I should be able to have the occasional quesadilla or slice of pizza.

But until then, I’m one of Those People, those people who can’t share. I can break bread with you, but that’s about it. Oh, and those fabulous Ugly Wintry Mix cocktails you all came up with? Yep. None of those, either. Which means I might now encounter Mr. or Ms. Pushytipples of my own, now that I’m not drinking much. (Or, more likely in my case, Mr. or Ms. Terribly-Concerned. I can have a drink occasionally — very occasionally — and while I appreciate being warned of things like unexpected rum in eggnog and habaneros in the queso dip, I also appreciate being treated like an adult. I am at the moment eternally grateful to one of the Fabulous Bureaucrats, whom I had dinner with two days after my diagnosis, and who unblinkingly sat through my dithering about whether or not ketchup was on my new list of forbidden foods, as well as my consumption of two glasses of white wine. The FB in question knows me well enough to know that I can’t change all my habits overnight, but change they will when I set my mind to it.)

Before all of this mishegoss went down, of course, I knew that food and identity were deeply linked, as were food and sociability: it’s pretty much what the food chapter of my book is about. But having to make a lot of changes, fast, brings certain issues into even sharper perspective.

For one thing, there was this brilliant you-know-you’re-middle-aged-when moment a few weeks ago, when I met a friend at Casablanca for a cocktail-hour business meeting. He immediately apologized and said he couldn’t eat, because he had a colonoscopy the next day; I, of course, couldn’t drink, as I have gastritis. (We ordered hot waters, he shared his broth with me, and we left a really good tip.) Not sharing food turns out to be as good a bonding experience as sharing it, though I doubt restaurateurs would agree.

It’s also been interesting to see how many of my friends with a strong ethnic identity have been quick to share recipes from their own cuisine with me. I’m not just appreciating their food; I need it. Their Greek, Bosnian, Filipino, Russian recipes will save me from my own sick body and restore me to health.

So in at least two cases, having restrictive food rules has brought me closer to people who either have similar — permanent or temporary — restrictions, or people whose ethnic identity is complemented and complimented by what I can eat. I’m sure I’ll run into others, as time goes on: people who disbelieve in my condition, or the way my doctors and I are treating it; people who will take it as a personal affront that I cannot eat or drink their particular favorite food; people who, one way or the other, make my biological condition into some kind of metaphor of rejection, perhaps rejection of something they hold dear.

Yesterday’s “Coupling” addressed that, from the perspective of a food consultant/chef who finds it impossible to form relationships with men who have food rules. She writes, “Gradually, I realized that a willingness to try new foods spoke to a person’s general openness to the world and new experiences.”

It may. Or it may speak to a person’s number of taste buds, or to their immune system or bowel functioning. Our bodily processes may be a metaphor for deeper psychological issues — or they may simply be the sometimes working, sometimes on-the-fritz results of a complicated and frankly klugey system. (No offense, but how anyone over the age of 25 can believe in Intelligent Design is beyond me. Wait ’til your knees start going and see how intelligently you think you were designed then, kid.)

The Milo arrived yesterday!

Not our dog Milo, of course; he’s been home with us all this lazy week, and enjoying very much having two relaxed and largely unproductive humans to snooze on. I mean the annual gift of Milo, the malted chocolate beverage, that someone has been leaving us every Christmas since Milo, the dog, arrived to live with us.

No Milo arrived this Christmas day, which amused me; did my newfound joy in Christmas somehow mean I had to give up the Milo of my Scroogier days? But yesterday, there it was on the porch, carefully wrapped.

We gave it to Milo to open:

But he liked the bubble wrap better:

So, here’s the thing about Christmas this year … I’m kind of getting into it. It’s weird to be surrounded by a holiday you don’t celebrate, and that is pretty much impossible to ignore. Dare I say, my own odd fashion, I’ve got a bit of empathetic Christmas spirit this year? When I wish people a Merry Christmas, it’s more than an automatic “How are you?” or “Take care!” — I’m finding myself really hoping that they’ll have one.

And a good bit of that is due to you, my readers.

Christmas when I grew up was a Big Deal, but not a religious deal. As I noted, I was raised in a fundamentalist church in which December 25 was not celebrated as the birth of Jesus, because the Bible didn’t say that’s when he was born. My parents, lapsed Catholics, were fine with that, and put on a spectacular, secular, Santa kind of holiday. The ConductMom in particular is a baker and confectioner of remarkable skill, and every weekend and evening from Thanksgiving on she would be in the kitchen, making a dozen or so of the favorites and trying out another dozen or so experiments: cookies, candies, fruitcakes, and more. The day itself was a celebration of plenitude — or crass consumerism, if you’re one of those types, but there was more to it than that. There were secrets and surprises and stories. And prosperity — we lived modest lives by many standards, but better than most of the world, and better than either of my parents grew up with — is something to celebrate, when that celebration is done with generosity and gratitude.

As I got older, traditions changed: instead of leaving milk and cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve, we’d go out for a movie and pizza. Or have guests over for eggnog and cookies, and then break out a bottle of champagne after they left, and each have a glass while we opened one, carefully selected, present. (We weren’t being selfish about the champagne; as I mentioned, we attended a strict church and not everyone drank, and those who didn’t generally preferred not to know about those who did.) As I got to be more interested in clothes than in toys, and inherited my mother’s instincts for a bargain (though never, regrettably, her skill with molten chocolate) another tradition emerged: she’d keep some of the Christmas budget reserved for post-holiday sales, and we’d hit the malls together.

Christmas was good, when I was a kid, and a teenager, and even a young adult. I missed out on the official “reason for the season,” but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find spiritual meaning in it — if anything, I’m a little bit better at finding spiritual meaning when I have to make it up as I go along. Christmas wasn’t about the birth of the savior for us, but about the ongoing condition of being saved — from poverty, from dysfunction, from hunger, from abuse — and about telling the same stories over and over again every year, about making traditions and keeping them flexible enough to accommodate our changing needs, about measured excess, a little bit of going overboard just for the fun of it, as well as to remind us of the more reliable joys of moderation.

It sounds so Jewish when I put it like that.

Away from my family, that magic faded. I wasn’t a child, or a mother, or a Christian, and thus even before I began my conversion process, Christmas had become the typical adult experience, more about logistics (“Okay, we’ll see your family in the morning, and then mine in the afternoon, but I’ve heard our friends will be in town, so let’s try to sneak off early and go to a bar or something with them”) and obligations (“What should I get for Dad this year?”). Travel arrangements and trying to figure out gifts that would fit a grad student’s budget and also pack well.

Still, the first Year without a Santa Claus was a surprising one. I hadn’t converted yet, but I knew I was going to. I was engaged to and living with Mr. Improbable at the time, and flat-out engaged with and living my dissertation. So on December 25, I got up as I had every morning that week, made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and a sliced apple, and started entering data. Around noon or so, Mr. Improbable said, “So, does it feel weird?” “I feel like the most freakin’ dedicated graduate student in the world!” I yelped. I was entering data on Christmas Day, like a little Cinderella of the social sciences!

After that, my feelings about Christmas continued to evolve. The next year I was very militant and angry about it — get your damn hegemonic holiday out of my face, already. By the following year I’d calmed down a bit, and figured, hey, look at all the pretty lights on the trees and free cookies in the office, and no pressure on me to do much of anything. That’s a bit of all right. We started our own tradition, of a movie and Chinese food with a small group of friends, and that’s been something to look forward to.

But this year … I don’t know. It’s changed. Learning from all of you what you love and dread about the holiday. What it means to you. Knowing that I am in the prayers of strangers I may never meet. Knowing the terrible losses some of you are facing this season, and your extraordinary courage to light a candle rather than to curse the darkness. Seeing from my diverse network of Facebook friends the childlike joy a 30-year-old man can take in the prospect of snow on Christmas Eve, the delight of seeing your child in a Christmas pageant, the pride of creating a beautiful home filled with presents and food and good smells to welcome friends and families. The memories of loss and pain, as well as joys, from Christmases past. The stresses. The difficulties of balancing “Jesus Christmas” and “Santa Christmas.” The extraordinary psychological and spiritual work of those who have needed and managed to break from their family of origin and create a new family, and celebrate Christmas within its loving embrace.

And the tiny joy, for me, of sending a cousin of mine a Christmas present — nothing big, just a couple of novels I think would appeal to him, that are obscure enough he might not encounter them on his own for a couple of decades — knowing that it would be a complete surprise, that he wouldn’t feel obligated to get me anything in return, that we hadn’t set up some kind of tradition where we now have to exchange gifts, inspired or not. Just a little token from the heart, with no strings attached.

Christmas isn’t part of my religion. But it’s part of my culture, and part of my past, and this year, I feel ready to own that, with no betrayal at all of who or what I am.

From the depths of my Jewish soul to you, Christian or atheist or Muslim or Jew or pagan:

Merry Christmas. God bless us, each and every one.

As some of you might have noticed, the Deep Insightful Blogging has kind of flagged off a bit since Italy. Prior to the trip, as I’d noted, things were extremely hectic: my “sick” kept recurring, and I was also on a work project at my Harvard job that had begun to feel truly Sisyphean. I needed that trip, and I’m still not all the way back to full-on work mode.

I’m hoping that will change at least a bit tomorrow, because I’ve decided that I’m going to take myself, and my laptop, and my coffee money, down to a coffee shop and spend the afternoon doing a one-woman corporate retreat. I’ve got a doctorate, a book, a newspaper column, two blogs, and a job at Harvard B-school: what can I turn these things into? What should I spend my energies on, given that newspapers and publishing and television and media in general is topsy-turvy, and no one knows what tomorrow will bring? What is really important to me about what I do? How do I define success for myself? And what are the intermediate steps — next week, next month, next quarter — to get me there?

These are tricky questions, and it may take more than one afternoon to get them settled. (Depends on how much coffee I have.) These are, to some extent, the questions that my boss and I study at HBS.

What’s the best career-planning advice you’ve ever gotten? What’s the worst? What’s the weirdest thing someone ever said you should be when you grew up? (I was once told that I’d be good in the Air Force. My terrible eyesight and inability to tell left from right would, I think, rule that straight out, assuming my entire personality hadn’t already done so.)

What’s the weirdest idea you ever had about yourself, in terms of what you should be when you grew up? My first genuine ambition was to be an animal behaviorist, which is something I’m still very interested in. Before that? I wanted to either work at McDonalds, or be a ballerina. Given my strongly held beliefs about the horrors that both fast food and ballet inflict on the human body, this is ironic, but I’m impressed that even as a four-year-old I somehow knew artists had day jobs.

When we got back from Italy last week, we returned to a surprise: a power outage. There was about an hour of daylight left, so we were able to dig out some tea lights and flash lights and get ourselves set up. And fortunately, we have a gas stove, and were able to get some tea going.

It was all very London-during-the-blitz, as we sat around drinking our tea by candlelight for a couple of hours before the power came on, and it wasn’t half bad. Normally, when we get home, we pounce right online and back into our normal work lives. It was rather nice not to have that as an option, to simply relax with tea and candles, however involuntarily, for a few hours before resuming everyday life. I wonder if we’d have the discipline to do that without a power outage. I suspect we wouldn’t.

The first one is for the ConductMom, because she likes pictures of laundry lines:

This is a big fancy palazzo:

This is a mosaic around the fountain of the big fancy palazzo. The mosaic went all the way around it and was made of long stones, which Mr. Improbable said (and I agree) is an impressive feat of engineering:

I’m not going to, but I can.

(Photo credit: David Kessler)

There’s another article in today’s Globe magazine that I’d like to draw your attention to, as well: the Boston Uncommon feature, an essay by Christopher Wood-Robbins about how being diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at age 40 changed his life. It’s a beautiful piece.

I’ve written before about Asperger’s, and my own fascination with the condition, and occasional frustration with people on the spectrum. The article I linked to in the previous sentence did more to help me “get it” than anything else, but something really leaped out at me from Mr. Wood-Robbins’s article:

Other kids taunted me at recess and threw dodge balls at my head (and it wasn’t during a game). I would skip down hallways to my next class and not understand why everyone else thought it was strange.

I’m about as neurotypical as they come, and those two lines could be taken directly from my unwritten memoirs. See, my folks moved around a bit when I was a kid, and while skipping down hallways might have been considered whimsical and cool in School 1, and I would be some kind of trendsetter, at School 2, it would be the dorkiest thing you could possibly do and the dodge balls would start flying. As a child, I could pick up on social cues, but I honestly couldn’t figure out why the same behavior, clothes, or lunchbox that would made me cool in one setting made me an outcast in another. The bullying pained me — but the unearned popularity mystified me just as much. And the fact that I knew I hadn’t changed led me to believe that social interaction is fundamentally unknowable … and probably not worth it.

So … yeah. Maybe I do know, a little more than I’ve let on, even to myself, what Aspie folks must feel like sometimes. And maybe some of my mixed emotions about them might be a desire to shut out those painful feelings of confusion and loneliness from my own childhood. I’ve always assumed that my difficulty getting along with people on the spectrum is that I’m very different from them. This is true, but maybe that’s not the whole story.

Because I know what it’s like to do the thing that seems right and normal and have people laugh in your face. I know what it’s like not to realize that the rules have changed until it’s too late. I know what it’s like not to get the joke. I know what it’s like not to even realize there was a joke until you find out, again too late, that you were the butt of it.

And I know what it’s like to say, “Screw it, I’m just going to hang out with my dog and read Sherlock Holmes. Y’all ain’t worth it.” Boy oh boy, do I know what that’s like.

The author ends his essay with this:

If you can try to understand why I function the way I do, then I will do my best to learn the proper way to do things on the neurotypical side of the fence. In other words, I’ll meet you halfway.

Change “halfway” to “for a cup of coffee,” Mr. Wood-Robbins, and you’ve got yourself a deal.

From Sociological Images comes this gem, an early 1900s chart describing the two paths a woman’s life can take, one leading to shame and ostracism, one to love and honor:

Now, you’ll notice that the ages line up here at first — 13, 20, 26 — but then the “good” woman winds up at age 60, while the “bad” one winds up at age 40. Perhaps they mean to suggest that she dies young, but I prefer to imagine, instead, that after all that study, obedience, virtue, devotion, and caretaking, the woman on the right treated herself to one HELL of an offstage midlife crisis before settling down to grandmotherhood! I hope she had a good time, and is whispering some scandalous stories in her granddaughter’s ear.

For anyone who is interested in the path of Miss Conduct’s life:

At 13: Bad literature (I much preferred Stephen King and those Hitchcock anthologies to the Newberry Award winners the librarians were always pushing on me)

At 20: Flirting and coquetry (well behind my peers on that one, actually, as a result of always having my nose stuck in a mystery novel in my teens)

At 26: Fast life & dissipation

At 32: Fast life & dissertation

At 40: Advice columnist.

I have a chronic illness that flares up from time to time. If you’re a personal friend*, you probably know what it is; if you aren’t, you don’t need to. It’s not life-threatening, or even painful, but it’s capable of knocking me down to about 30% of operating capacity for days at a time. There’s medicine that helps — sometimes — and things I can do to minimize the chances of a flareup — sometimes. The body is a complex system affected in many ways by many things, and there’s no easy if-X-then-Y with this one.

(The main reason I’m not saying what it is isn’t because I’m terribly private, or that it’s terribly disgusting, but because people feel compelled, when hearing of another’s illness, to either share their own stories of much worse suffering or else suggest this new medicine or diet or asana that worked wonders for their sister-in-law who had the exact same thing, really! Neither of these are lines of discourse that most sick people are at home to. Although it does motivate us to get our strength back, so we can pop you one.)

Part of my New Year’s resolutions last week was to get better. To heal myself. Not physically, because I can’t do that, but to reconcile my body and my mind and my responsibilities and my relationships so that I don’t make things any worse than they have to be. I recently finished Loretta Lynn’s second autobiography, Still Woman Enough, and one line jumped out for its pure simplicity and sense: “I do not believe in pain if there is any way around it.” A woman who has had as much pain in her life as Loretta Lynn damn well knows what she’s talking about, and damn well knows that pain does not ennoble. We’ll be talking about Ms. Lynn — and about Tina Turner, too — a bit later.

I wasn’t intending to spend my New Year’s energy on that project, but guess what, the Days of Awe this year turned into the Days of Aw Crap, It’s Back Again. If the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are like a dangerous ocean voyage, the good Lord decreed that I was going to spend most of my time in sickbay. So I figured, okay, that’s my challenge for this year. It wasn’t what I’d planned to focus on, but you can’t order up life lessons like they’re adult-ed seminars. God don’t run no JuCo.

Anyway, here are my resolutions:

1. Don’t use my illness as an excuse to get out of doing things that I really can do, and that would be good for me, but that I just don’t want to do. Sometimes I will bail out on things when I’m sick because I’m embarrassed to compromise. I don’t want to call a friend and say, “I can’t make our dinner date tonight because I don’t feel well, but I’d love to see you–could you come over for a quick after-work cup of tea instead?” It’s easier to pretend that “something came up” and I need to reschedule entirely. I feel weird going to the gym and only working out for 15 minutes. It’s easier not to go at all. But hey, my friends love and accept me, and I’m sure everyone at the gym is paying attention to their own workouts and not timing mine.

… but …

2. Don’t be all macho or martyrish and force myself to do things that I really can’t. I’m not doing anyone any favors by promising things I can’t deliver. Nor am I doing myself any favors by pushing my limits, either because I don’t want to believe that I have them, or because I want to punish myself for being so weak and stupid as to get sick in the first place.

3. Do what I can to keep it under control. Oh, all right — it’s a stomach thing, okay? And I will pop you one if you give me unsolicited advice. Anyway, the point is, there’s certain things I can eat or avoid eating that put me at lesser risk for having a flareup. Small, frequent, high-fiber/high-fat meals are good; coffee and raw vegetables and too much rich food are bad. Sometimes. Mostly. Like I said, it’s a complex system.

… but …

4. Don’t blame myself when I do get sick, even if I got sick during a time when I wasn’t eating “right.” I’m not ignoring the reality of the connection — although as mentioned it’s by no means a hard-and-fast causality — between my habits and my health, but I truly don’t have to paint it in moral terms. Getting sick doesn’t mean God is punishing me for having a latte. It means I took a small gamble and lost. And we take a gamble every day just by getting out of bed, let alone leaving the house.

… and finally …

5. When I’m sick, to realize that the inevitable feelings of low self-worth and hopelessness are part of the symptoms. I don’t have to fight the feelings, but I don’t have to believe in them, either. That’s a tricky line to walk, but I think I can do it. I did pretty well with that last week, and I’m proud of myself for it.

I’m posting this because maybe you haz a sick, too. A lot of people do. And a lot of us are ashamed of it. We are a problem-solving, can-do, bootstrapping nation with a medical tradition that doesn’t handle chronic and complicated illnesses terribly well. (I’m about the furthest thing from a New Ager when it comes to medicine — don’t give me a smudge stick and healing dances if I need penicillin, already. But that doesn’t mean I think Western medicine has it all figured out right now. If it did, we wouldn’t continue to do research.) And 21st-century American culture has raised body-shaming to something akin to a religious tradition.

So maybe if you haz a sick, you could stop beating yourself up over it. Do the right thing by yourself, as much as you can, and when you can’t, well, that’s life. You can’t always be perfect, and even if suffering is the price you pay for a fall, that doesn’t mean it’s the price you deserve to pay.

Love yourself. Forgive yourself. Heal yourself.

Comments open, and please don’t take my “Don’t give me advice!” screeches to mean that I don’t want to hear what’s worked for you in dealing with your own chronic or recurrent illnesses. I very much do. I mean, please don’t tell me what to eat, that’s all.

*I’ve always thought the term “personal friend” was redundant and stupid, and in most cases, it is. But sometimes it is the right phrase. I do feel I have a relationship with my regular readers and commenters, but you aren’t people I know in everyday life. Friends, but not “personal friends.”

Happy New Year!

(And sorry for the kind of high Jewish/religious content here lately. I try to keep mixing stuff up on the blog so there’s a nice variety, but sometimes you flip a coin and it just turns up heads ten times in a row, you know?)

One of the things I like about being Jewish is getting to celebrate New Year’s in the fall, which always feels like the start of the year to me anyway. A lifetime in the educational system will do that to you.

If you’re confused about all those Jewish holidays in the fall … you’re not the only one. (Even if you’re Jewish yourself!) There are plenty of books and guides online that can clear things up or mystify you even further, but here’s what it all means to me. I don’t know why the metaphor of an ocean voyage is the one I use for the holy days. I grew up in Kansas, for heaven’s sake. But this is what works. (Especially this year, when Rosh Hashanah falls on International Talk Like a Pirate Day!)

The month before Rosh Hashanah is Elul. During Elul, we are supposed to do a kind of “spiritual accounting” of the past year, and reflect on what we have done right or wrong. This is like preparing for a big sailing trip. What questions would you be asking yourself if you were going on a long ocean voyage — I don’t mean a cruise, I mean the kind where you’re part of the crew? I think they’d be questions like this: What do I really need to take with me in order to survive? What should I throw out? Who should I say goodbye to, and what should I say? Do I owe anyone apologies? Do I owe anyone money, or favors, or their copy of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union back? Am I in good enough shape for the rigors of this journey? What do I need to do to prepare myself? Do I have illnesses or injuries that need tending before I go?

Then, Rosh Hashanah! The New Year! And our spiritual ship is launched. Rosh Hashanah is serious, but joyful. There is risk ahead but great adventure. We all wear our best clothes and wish each other a happy journey.

The 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are known as “The Days of Awe.” Everything you do on these days is fraught with significance: we try to be as observant as possible, as strict with ourselves and forgiving of others as we can. Imagine living on a ship, where a mistake might cost you a limb or life, where you must get along with your shipmates at all cost. The Days of Awe are a time for being very care-full.

And then — shipwreck! Yom Kippur! The ship of our souls and our best intentions is not enough to keep us afloat, and we crash. We fast. We do not wash. We live the day, as much as possible, like walking dead, taking no food, no water, no joy in our own bodies or those of others. We allow ourselves to be shaken and wrecked. And yet, at the end of the day, we break our fast together, and celebrate that we have survived.

But survival after shipwreck isn’t easy. We’re on a desert island now, aren’t we? So we built huts! The next holiday — not properly considered one of the High Holy Days, but still connected — is Sukkot. Sukkot is a harvest festival, celebrated by building booths (the sukkahs) and eating and sleeping outdoors. Removed from its agricultural meaning, and put into the context of the HHDs, Sukkot can be seen as a kind of regrouping after the shipwreck of Yom Kippur. We are safe. We are alive. We are with our loved ones. But we are not comfortable yet. We’ve found a desert island to sustain us, but we haven’t claimed it as our land or built a civilization on it. Sukkot celebrates the joyful body, the joyful community. But it isn’t complete.

And then — Simchat Torah. Which literally means, “Happy Torah.” We read the Torah completely through every year, with a different portion for each Shabbat. Simchat Torah celebrates the end of one year’s Torah cycle, and the beginning of another. This — this is when we say, “We have survived. And we have built something. And that thing will continue beyond our short lives.” We celebrate living, not just surviving. Peoplehood, not just community. Civilization, not just culture. We aren’t refugees on a desert island any more. We are citizens and nation builders.

So there it is. We prepare for the voyage, we launch the ship, we sail as careful and true as we can, we wreck ourselves anyway, we drag our bodies to shore and find nourishment there, and then we begin to build something to be proud of.

Every year, we get to do this.

Every year, this wonderful adventure.

I set sail tonight.

If you can’t pronounce chag sameach, then wish me bon voyage.