"The payoff of surviving your 20’s has to be that when you make mistakes or fall down the stairs, literally or figuratively, you don’t think of yourself as a person who makes mistakes or falls down the stairs. There’s too much historical evidence that you are not always the one: sometimes I am the one, sometimes he’s the one. Your hyperhidrosis ain’t shit, girl, compared to the cystic acne over there and the IBS way over there and the narcolepsy in the back. But of course it’s all there is, until you become Larry David (the metamorphosis starts early, but the progression is slow and almost imperceptible (only remarked [...]

"There is no arguing with exultation." -Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

Disneyland. Like many another native of Los Angeles, I have a vexed relationship with The Happiest Place on Earth.¹ A childhood spent in pure enchantment during every trip to Disneyland gave way to an adulthood plagued with guilty doubts about that special Disney brand of child consumerism and corporate greed. My love of fine graphic design dates, I think, to an appreciation of the gorgeous layout and palette of the precious book of Disneyland tickets. And what of Grad Nite, the annual Southern California ritual where the park is closed down to all but newly-minted high school graduates [...]

It starts at a very young age. The summer after third grade, my parents sent me to Jewish sleepaway camp. I was deeply homesick at first and cried a lot in my bunk bed, but by the end of the month I didn't want to leave. So I went back, summer after summer—boarding the plane with a few other Jewish kids from my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, and flying to Appleton, Wisconsin, with a stop-over at O'Hare, where a volunteer from Hadassah would meet us at the gate and try to keep us from the moo shu pork at Wok-N-Roll.

Those summers blur together, but each day begins [...]

The oldest precursor in Western culture to the new six-week TV Land reality series "First Love, Second Chance" is a play. It tells the story of a couple deeply in love, one of those formative, life-changing early relationships, not to mention the boy's first kiss. The relationship ends abruptly, as intense relationships often do, when the boy is unexpectedly sent far away. Many years pass, and both the boy and the girl are physically transformed beyond recognition. But such, we are meant to feel, is the strength of their bond, that when they meet again, without even knowing each other's identity, they fall in love and marry.

The [...]

I came late to Facebook, after going through all the predictable phases: the disdain, the excuses, the stalking via “borrowed” log-in, the particular form of procrastination known as “what-would-I-put-in-my-hypothetical-profile?,” followed eventually by an ambivalent, job-search related realization that I had to bite the bullet. But before I did—before I opened the floodgates of reconnection—I knew I had to pick up the phone and call my childhood best friend. We hadn’t talked in years, but I couldn’t stand the thought of putting our past on the same level as everyone else’s, basically ensuring that our long history would be reduced to smiley, yearbook-style platitudes.