How dare I have fun during chemotherapy? It\’s not that I look forward to seven hours of treatment. But with four of six rounds behind me, I no longer feel I\’m heading into an abyss.
Even as organizations are canceling their summer Israel programs, for some teens already in Israel the experience is proving invaluable.
The first time I went over to Jon\’s apartment, I thought it was so sweet that he had a framed black and white picture of his dad on the nightstand, smiling somewhat ruggedly in a flannel shirt. Only it wasn\’t Jon\’s dad. It was Don Henley.
You go out. You talk to a lot of people you don\’t know. Maybe you gossip a little. Maybe you flirt. Maybe you try too hard and end up acting just a bit like someone else.
You wake up the next day with the uneasy feeling that you\’ve just gotten drunk and had a one-night stand. But you haven\’t. You just have what I think of as a mild \”shameover,\” that uneasy feeling that you\’ve woken up with a stranger and that stranger is you.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I had occasion to peer into two almost antithetical worlds of matchmaking. The first: a do-it-yourself option courtesy of a Jewish dating service on the Internet. The second: \”Old School\” Jewish Matchmaking like a picture postcard sent through time from Anatevka.
A newspaper office is, in some ways, a hot-house world. There are those insistent deadlines every week; copy to edit; layouts to peruse; the telephone and e-mail increasingly the link to a world that\’s outside.\nBut then — thank goodness — there are those forays out of the office. They turn out nearly always to be a surprise; nearly always a learning experience.\n\nI had three such experiences this past week.\n\n
In \”Hit and Runway,\” a straight Italian-American naif teams up with a gay Jew to write a screenplay. In \”Aimee & Jaguar,\” a Jewish woman and a Nazi\’s wife begin a torrid affair. In \”Man is a Woman,\” a gay man marries a woman, a Yiddish singer, who has never known a man.
Daisy Lawrence is worried about her friends.\n\”They\’re really nice Jewish people,\” says the twentysomething single, \”hard working, very bright, nice looking, ethical Jewish people — and they all have tremendous difficulty meeting other Jewish people.\”\n\nSo when the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles put together a Jewish Singles Task Force to study the dating habits of Los Angeles\’ Jewish singles, Lawrence got involved.\n\n
Ever since I moved to Los Angeles, I\’ve been completely lost.
No, I don\’t mean spiritually or emotionally. I mean literally. I\’ve been lost for pretty much two straight years.
My name is Sarah — actually, it used to be Sarah, but that was before I went to Israel and experienced the best summer of my life. A summer that changed me forever.
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