Dear NYC Department of Parking Violations

Here is the actual letter I sent to the Department of Parking Violations yesterday in response to a $45 ticket I got last week when my car was parked on W109th Street. As I write, there has to be a buffer zone or grace period of reasonable flexibility in matters like Alternate Side Parking regulations. If you disagree with me, please let me know. Personally, I will continue to protest such ridiculous fines and urge you to do the same!

March 22, 2011

To Whom It May Concern:

This ticket is an affront to law abiding citizens of New York City and frankly, I protest the fact that an officer even used city time to issue it to me.

I very carefully checked the appropriate sides of the street for Alternate Side Parking regulations the morning it was issued. I watched as the street cleaners went by and then re-parked my car, sitting in my parked vehicle until just before 10 am when the ban against parking on that side was officially lifted.

This city has to have a buffer zone of reasonable flexibility for Alternate Side Parking. To ticket someone for the sin of leaving their car FIVE minutes before the appropriate time is ludicrous.

And if you’re wondering why I abandoned my post at 9:55 the answer was because I had spent so much time driving around finding a good parking spot that at that point I was dying to use the bathroom.

My choice was running to locate a bathroom or peeing in my car.

In case I didn’t make myself clear, I find it completely insane that officers are patrolling the streets to find cars that are “illegally parked” on streets that have already been cleaned. This is a bizarre definition of illegal. I can show you better definitions on many other city blocks.

It’s one thing to ticket a car at 9:30 or even 9:45…but it’s another thing to punish drivers for such a slim transgression. Even on the street where I live, the cops are far more flexible and NO ONE gets ticketed for leaving five minutes before the appointed time.

Therefore, I protest this ticket and urge traffic police to use their time more fruitfully.

Sincerely,

Shira Dicker

Sad Buddha

One week ago, it was just becoming clear that the massive earthquake in Japan was but the first of many calamities. Indeed, over the past seven days, the Japanese people have been subjected to disaster, death, displacement and danger on an unprecedented scale.

It is unoriginal and even perilous to term the devastation in Japan biblical but that is the description that comes closest. The suffering is so widespread, extreme and holistic that it appears wrought by a wrathful God.

Unlike accounts in the Bible, however, there is no indication of an egregious sin committed by the Japanese people to provoke such vengeance, no prophet of doom who provided a warning or chastised the population to repent. Whether one concludes that God is involved or not, the disaster in Japan occasions questions about God's existence (or inaction) in the face of such complete devastation.

To paraphrase Rabbi Harold Kushner, it is entirely appropriate to ask why such a bad thing happened to good people. Indeed, Rabbi Kushner's comments are included in a rather nice feature that CNN's belief blog put together on this topic. It is available here.

My personal theology places God at a remove from such events but I would be lying if I did not admit to an attempt to intuit God's motive or presence in all of this. Certainly, such questions are evoked by contemplation of the Shoah or other acts of man's inhumanity. Walking home from shul yesterday, I found myself committing a moral and intellectual misdeed: comparing the suffering of the Japanese with that of the victims of Hitler's Final Solution.

Though I take arms against the penchant to compare calamities, thereby robbing each of its uniqueness, I could not banish the thought that last week in Japan, Nature became a Nazi, hellbent on wiping out an entire nation through various acts of breathtaking cruelty. Perhaps thinking "Nazi"when contemplating inhumanity is a reflexively Jewish act, or maybe the word has just become shorthand for ultimate evil.

Inevitably, though, instead of feeling the sting of God's absence in the face of murderous acts of human nature or Mother Nature, I imagine God's grief over His/Her inability to intervene in earthly events.

But if nature turned against this damaged planet of ours, focusing her fury on Japan, that still only accounts for two disasters -- the earthquake and tsunamis. The third disaster, nuclear, is entirely man-made.

It is the nuclear nightmare, more than Mother Nature's meltdown, that will haunt Japan for decades to come.

And speaking of nightmares, I have been quite unable to sleep over this past week. With HOBB away, I have taken to sleeping with my laptop next to me, waking up several times during the night to check the news. I am riveted by the scope and depth of this disaster. I am haunted by the images, the faces and the staggering facts. One day it is the children's plight that moves me to tears, the next day, it is that of the elderly. The sheer destruction that has taken place within this country is so enormous that I weep for that as well, for all that is lost, broken and shattered. Brokenness itself is something to grieve.

Watching events unfold in Japan, the world at large seems shaken on some fundamental level.

Though local, this is an event of global and historical significance.

And personal significance as well, for not very long ago, less than three years to be exact, I was the mother of the bar mitzvah boy with the Japanese-infused ceremony, complete with beautiful Konichiwa banners, fans and parasols -- and of course, sushi. On a sultry June morning in 2008, I sat proudly at Congregation Ramath Orah listening to my youngest son talk about shared values in Jewish and Japanese tradition. Please find the text reproduced below.

On the pages of this blog, my youngest child is known as Little Babe. The Japanese theme came out of a several-year-long obsession he had with Japanese culture, food, language and history that began with the cartoon show, Pokemon. The interest in Pokemon cartoons extended to its characters and cards, then morphed into a similar obsession with Yu-Gi-Oh. From anime Little Babe graduated into manga, the Japanese graphic novels. Shortly, our apartment became overrun with these volumes. After a year, Little Babe stopped buying manga in translation and began teaching himself Japanese from the original editions. That, in turn, led to the purchase of dictionaries, both paper and digital, various CD-based language programs and eventually, the hiring of a tutor. Little Babe spent his spare time and money in Japanese markets and shops such as Mitsuwa in Edgewater, NJ and Kinokuniya in Manhattan.

It was a pleasure planning a bar mitzvah that catered to my son's Japanese passion. At the time, I put up a special blog, which is available here. In response to the Japan disaster, Little Babe is currently spearheading an effort to produce a fundraising concert in New York. A gifted musician, he will perform and will be inviting other teen groups to share the stage. The date is currently April 10th, the venue TBA. I will post more information as it becomes available. In this effort, he is working in cooperation with the remarkable SAR High School in Riverdale as well as the Joint Distribution Committee.

Please write to me if you want to get involved in any way.

As promised, here is a portion of Little Babe's bar mitzvah speech, which provides inspiration and one more reason, beyond the humanitarian, for Jews to jump to the support of the Japanese victims of this many-pronged disaster:

domo aregato no sannyuu made watashino bara mitsuva

ברוכים הבאים לבר מצוה שלי

In other words...thank you all for coming to my bar mitzvah.

You may have noticed by now that I'm interested in Japanese culture. I even wanted to wear a kimono while leining but for some reason my parents weren't into it.

I see symbols of Japan everywhere I look. Perhaps it was meant to be that my middle name is Shachar, or dawn, which commemorates how I was born at dawn, and is also reminiscent of Japan, the land of the rising sun.

You may not realize it but there are many things that Japanese and the Jews have in common. For one, they both have a feline national symbol. We of course have the Lion of Judah which adorns our own ark and stained glass windows here at Ramath Orah as well as many arks in other synagogues.

The Japanese have the monokie niko, the lucky cat, symbolizing wealth, happiness, prosperity and business. Japan and Israel comprise the bookend borders of the Asian continent, with Israel at the southwesternmost point in Asia, and Japan to the Northeast.

But perhaps most fundamentally, the value of honor, or kavod, that is so deeply ingrained in both value systems. This value is expressed in both cultures through the custom of removing one's shoes before entering certain areas.

Take my parsha (Torah portion) for example. I started out the parsha reading about Aharon lighting the menora. Try to visualize how glorious he looked while performing this service in the Temple. He was adorned with eight different kinds of the fanciest clothes, including a robe, an apron, a tunic, and a big fluffy hat. These clothes were quite colorful, with royal blue, bright red, and pure white. Every part of him was up and covered. Every part that is, except for his feet.

You would think Hashem (G-d) would have commanded the Kohen Gadol (high priest) to wear shoes of the fanciest kind, in fitting with the rest of his outfit.

But we know from elsewhere in Tanakh that G-d considered it more respectful to remove one's shoes in his presence. When Moshe was at the burning bush he was ordered to do so, as was Joshua in the presence of the angel. Indeed, the rabbis tell us that every Jew was commanded to remove their shoes before entering the Temple mount. The Talmud learns this requirement from the verse in Isaiah, where the prophet scolds the Jewish people, quoting G-d Himself as saying "Who asked this of you that you trample my courtyard?"

Why, you may ask, did G-d find it disrespectful to wear shoes in His presence?

I think we can learn the answer from our Japanese friends. From what I've read in manga, the reason the Japanese insist on shoe removal upon entering a home is because keeping your shoes on shows you're in a hurry to leave, just as keeping your coat on is rude even in our culture. Taking these things off shows kavod, respect, in that you're telling your host "I like it here in your home and I want to stay a while" I think G-d is telling us the same through the prophet Isaiah. Since the Temple Mount is where His presence, or shekhina, rests, the Mount is His home, so to speak. In hebrew we call it "Har Habayit", literally the mountain of G-d's house. Not surprisingly, G-d found it rude to appear as if you were in a rush to leave His home.

So we see there are some shared values between us and our far eastern friends. What accounts for this? If we assume that all spiritual truth originated with Abraham, how did some of this truth find its way to the far east? One theory is based on the narrative found in Genesis 25.

There, it tells us something that is not so well known: that Abraham took another wife named Ketura after Sarah had died, and they had six sons. We don't hear anything about these sons at all except the fact that Abraham "gave them gifts, and sent them eastward to the land of the east", or in Hebrew, he sent them "kedma el eretz kedem. "The rabbis tell us that the Torah does not waste words, so why does it repeat like this, "eastward to the east"?

One interpretation is that Abraham sent them literally to the FAR east, and that the "gifts" he gave them were the spiritual gifts of kaballah.

And so the Zohar says these children carried the spiritual spark of Abraham with them even though they would later forget where this spark came from. Avraham was told by G-d that he would be a "father of many nations" (Av hamon goyim), and we can see that his spiritual legacy lives on in many peoples. This idea, that everyone shares spiritual bonds in common, is a value my family has always stressed.

I hope to continue to embody this value in my own life, as I continue to explore Japanese, American, and of course my own Jewish heritage.

Weather Porn

This is a picture I took with my BlackBerry last week while traipsing, tipsy, through a blizzard at 11:30 pm, returning from an event at a club in the East Village.

I love the way the photo came out. It looks cozy, reminiscent of Olde New York with the sepia tone and soft lighting.

The building on the right is my apartment. I had taken the subway uptown from 14th Street after transferring from the L train. Emerging at 116th street, I encountered a magical snowy kingdom on the Columbia campus, students building snowmen, singing and dancing, running up and down the steps of Low Library, security men strolling and smiling.

One week and one blizzard later, the magic is completely gone.

Now, New York City is a sodden, dreary, depressing, sloshy, slushy, dangerous mess.

The snow, the cold, the very winter is boring beyond belief, a lecturer who cannot arrive at his point, a houseguest who cannot leave.

By now, everyone's shoes and boots look like crap. Everyone's hair is in a perpetual static frenzy. Everyone seems to be gaining weight, scarfing down baked goods.

Except for the exercise bulimics I see at Dodge Fitness Center.

Over the past two months, I have gone from a low-carb diet to a mega-carb diet, eating foodstuffs I have shunned for the better part of a decade. Today I ate a cream puff at the Starbuck Espresso Cafe at the 82nd Street Barnes and Noble and a bag of Dipsy Doodles a few hours later.

Reader, I used to observe a macrobiotic diet.

I thank God fervently each time I walk across the Columbia campus to my class because the journey takes 3 minutes max from the moment I leave my apartment building to the time I cross the threshold of the J School building.

I feel sorry for any of my fellow students who have to shlep from, say, 113th street. Or farther beyond.

Everyone is in a crummy mood. I got into an ugly war of words with a woman who stole a cab from me outside of Fairway. Books, films and theatre seems irrelevant. No one but no one paid attention to the fact that today was Groundhog Day. At this moment, the only thing that keeps New Yorkers from feeling overly-victimized is the crisis in Egypt...and news from other cities and states and continents where weather conditions are worse.

There's nothing to say anymore.

Therefore, I propose an escapist concept: Weather Porn.

That's right. Fantasizing while gazing at photographs of beautiful summer scenes.

Tough times call for creative solutions. It is time to abandon that romantic notion of seasonal fidelity and explore scenarios of glorious summer days, sandy beaches, sunburns, heat rising off the pavement, sleeveless dresses, shorts, tank tops, sandals, sweat pouring between one's breasts.

It is time to break one's commitment to the winter and surrender to the impulse to fetishize the superiority of sunshine, warm breezes, long days, high temperatures and UV rays.

So, allow me to be a Weather Porn Wingman.

In order to fuel one's fantasies, the Internet offers a plethora of pictures.

Choose your search engine and punch in the proper keywords. Once you master this method, I recommend checking out the videos on YouTube.

I have collected some images to get you started. Warning: these might not be safe for work as they might cause you to board the next plane outta here...assuming flights are taking off from local airports.

The Ballad of the Pom Mom or Why the Tiger Mother Has Been Licked on the Battle Field

This is a belated backlash to the backlash created by the sensationalist Wall Street Journal essay by Amy Chua, the fascistic uber-mama self-described as a "Tiger Mother."

Provocatively entitled, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior," Chua's piece ran last Saturday, January 8th, my last day in Berlin. In yesterday's WSJ, a teeny fraction of reader emails were printed, just 16 of the 5700 comments generated by the article. An editor's note acknowledges that this is the largest amount of reader response ever generated by a single article that ran in the paper.

In her essay (and her book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) Ms. Chua reveals her recipe for raising Master Offspring. This secret formula includes the elimination of many of the childhood ingredients that most contemporary parents consider essential to emotional well-being. Chua confesses that her daughters were forbidden to:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

The psychological wrongheadedness of this approach to childrearing struck me as so blatant that my initial response was not outrage but disbelief. How could someone so educated have such a narrow concept of success? I wondered. How is it possible to grow to adulthood in this culture and not realize that life is so much more than "being the best"...whatever that means? How could someone with as many degrees and pedigrees as Chua remain so narrow-minded and ignorant about what it means to have a full, happy life?

The second phase of response awakened my inner child advocate. Surfing the blogosphere, I noted I was hardly alone in my disgust; indeed, outrage and disgust appeared to be the predominant responses to the Tiger Mother's battle hymn and I was merely catching up with the rest of the world. Where was Chua's respect for the individuality of her children? Where was her curiosity about who her daughters actually were...apart from her own egotistical aspirations for them? Does she possess a spiritual dimension? Where is her sensuality? Her desire to snuggle, hug, love, play, have fun???

Having witnessed the tragic failure of Chua's method of hyper-driven parenting in up-close and personal ways (like some of the readers point out in their sobering missives) I was amazed that she had failed to notice the same. Chua and I are roughly the same age, products of a similar era. Being a member of a generation that understands success and achievement as holistic, stemming from many factors, it seems mystifying that Chua has managed to myopically cling to a model of success that is purely quantitative, based only on external markers of achievement.

At the same time, I am also compelled to point out that many of my generation are guilty of the exact opposite sin -- let's call it Pussycat Parenting. Indeed, it is largely the children of Pussycat Parents whom I am studying as they drift through their twenties and thirties in Berlin. In my interviews with them, most of my young American subjects credit their parents with giving them an appreciation for life as an open road but blame them for failing to provide them with a road map. Still, I've yet to read a tome justifying the Pussycat approach to parenting.

Maybe it is just a crass and clever commercial venture but Amy Chua has branded her dangerous childrearing method and so we must respond. Perhaps I've been spending too much time in Germany but by treating her kids as lab rats in her personal eugenics project, Chua seems to me a mad scientist of sorts...or worse.

Sadly, coverage of Chua's metaphysics of mothering competed with news of the Tucson shooting. Freshly returned to New York, I devoted most of this past week to re-acclimating myself to my family, preparing for my new semester at Columbia and contemplating the fruits of my research. L'Affair Tiger Mother seemed ultimately so depressing that I largely forgot about it for most of the week.

And then came the weekend, with the opportunity to reflect and read and react afresh.

Hundreds of reactions later (including one in yesterday's WSJ by the self-proclaimed "Bad Mother" Ayelet Waldman who sounds just as nightmarish as Chua and looks scarily frumpy in the accompanying photo, while her Chinese counterpart looks fit and fashionable in her publicity photos, most fitting for the mother of the Master Race) the initial shock of Chua's unapologetic POV has worn off but the conversation itself remains relevant, necessitating further response.

Because it is a sunny Monday morning and a holiday to boot, I will attempt to wrap up this post as I have BIG PLANS today, which include wandering through the Met and the newly-renovated Museum of the Moving Image and attending an MLK event at Symphony Space this evening where my soul-sistah Neshama Carlebach will perform with the Green Pastures Baptist Choir, in addition to various other church and synagogue groups.

So here's what I want to say: Chua, Waldman and their ideological cronies are sadly misguided in their missions as Tiger Mothers -- Chinese, Jewish and otherwise. Needless to say, Pussycat Parents are just wusses.

The path to true happiness belongs to the Pom Mom.

By which I mean the Pomeranian Mother.

My chief credential in forging this philosophy of childrearing is my PhD in Pomology, accrued after a decade devoted to studying the Path of the Pomeranian, an inherently joyful, adorable and loving creature.

Not to mention having raised three children of my own.

I dedicate the rest of this post to my spiritual guides Alfie and Nala, who are my gurus to the good life and to my kids, the Three Babes, who exceed my expectations for wonderfulness every minute of every day, even when I'm pissed off at them.

Here are some of the basic tenets of the Pom Mom, which find expression not in a battle hymn, but in a ballad:

Like her furry canine role model, the Pom Mom understands that in order to thrive, her little ones need ample opportunities to run, play, explore, snuggle, eat, sleep and receive treats and rewards for good behavior.

While the Pom Mom acts as the leader of her pack of pups, she doesn't exercise maternal muscle through bullying, demeaning, threatening or deprivation.

Her governing principle is nurturance.

Her basic belief is that love is a stronger motivator than fear.

She is big believer in the value of free play, of fun, of discovery.

She sees curiosity as a birthright.

The ability to perform tricks for applause is meaningless to her.

What matters is creativity and character.

She knows her offspring by their sweet individual traits and knows that the flip-side to a stubborn streak is often tenacity of spirit, that an overly timid pup needs to be taught the value of risk-taking.

She fosters sibling loyalty and is proud when her children act in compassionate, even selfless ways.

She glows when they master a difficult challenge and understands her important role as protector, teacher, enabler and cheerleader.

She scoffs at the empty designation "Best in Show."

She knows that the best part of life is to be found in the comfort of each other's embrace and that, as Peanuts famously stated, "Happiness is a Warm Puppy."

Bye Bye Berlin

This is the view outside my living room apartment at 7:30 a.m.

For anyone who wants to understand some of the key differences between Berlin and New York City, this photo is key. In Berlin, it is rare to find a shoveled sidewalk during winter. In Berlin, the snow piles and gets icy and you are forced to tread gingerly on an slick surface dotted with sand at the very most.

Here, there is a sensibility promoting safety and comfort (and there are lawsuits when people fall) so the walks get shoveled. Our penchant for safety is the object of some scorn abroad. On my last night in Berlin, I sat in a Neukolln bar talking to a German about the local jazz scene when he started railing against America's infantilizing safety codes and rules and restrictions.

Oh, I don't know. I'm kind of happy about much of it.

For instance, I like the fact that it is illegal to throw lit firecrackers at people here on New Year's Eve.

So, I'm back in New York and reflecting upon my nine-day Berlin adventure, preparing for the new semester at Columbia, morphing back into a mom and wife, feeling sickened by the violence in Arizona, grieving over the untimely death of Debbie Friedman, resisting the work I need to do, embracing the sunshine that bathes the piles of snow beyond the shoveled walks of my campus, pondering the fact of my identity as a 21st Century global citizen, missing my oldest child whom I bid farewell to at the bus stop on Yorkstrasse on Sunday morning, seeing everything that is right and wrong about my country through the lens of having been somewhere else.

Winter Sun in Berlin: A Postscript

Just to set the record straight about today...technically the sun was shining but the temperature dropped precipitously, hurting my nose when I breathed in, making me practically shake with shivers, though I wore a ludicrous amount of layers.

I hear snow is due tomorrow.

It's the middle of the Berlin night and I'm back home now, after checking out the scene at King Size, a narrow, smoky and fashionably overcrowded club on Friedrichstrasse.

Allegedly there was something called "Artist's Night" there, but I don't know what that meant. I ordered a shockingly overpriced 5 Euro white wine and sat at the bar hoping I looked mysterious instead of rejected. After an hour of wondering if people took me for a spy, I fought my way out of the front door (a process that took more than 10 minutes, seriously) and jumped into a cab after missing the night bus by about 15 seconds.

That's me the night after New Year's Day...bundled up in bed.

About to do the same now.

Guten Nacht.

The Sun Also Rises...in Berlin

Here's the view outside of the Kreuzberg apartment I'm staying in during my research trip to Berlin.

The vista is hardly remarkable except for one detail: it features sunshine casting SHADOWS.

After nearly a solid week in Berlin, this is the first time I have seen anything resembling daylight or shadows outside of the Moholy-Nagy exhibit at the Gropius.

Bathed in sunshine, Berlin looks radically different. Though I had only a handful of hours of sleep last night, I am instantly awake.

The abundant sunshine is big news for those who live here, especially the young American expats who talk of the onerous experience of the Berlin winter. Just as the Hungarian-born Laszlo Moholy-Nagy came to Berlin as a young man in the 1920's, they are drawn to this city with its world-weary cosmopolitanism, its edgy culture, its demimonde, its scent of gritty sophistication, its clustering of the creative class. There are somewhere between 10,000 and 14,000 thousand Americans living in Berlin now. Whether they are casting any shadow on the life of the city remains to be seen.

The Kreuzberg apartment I am staying in belongs to Big Babe, who left today for Vienna to interview John Malkovich. In the absence of my son's stewardship, I'm on my own for the next couple of days, hoping to get lost in a creative way to discover some aspects of Berlin I hadn't seen in my previous five visits.

I am hoping to stumble upon young Americans during daylight hours because, thus far, I have only had luck meeting them after dark...in clubs and bars and house parties. When I pressed Big Babe yesterday to recommend some cafes where the American expats hang out, he shrugged and said he didn't think they were awake during the day.

Though I was skeptical of that claim, I note that the Berlin winter produces a feeling of daytime hibernation...or at least of sleepwalking through a dreary landscape.

In about one minute I will tear myself away from my laptop to shower and seize the day myself, possibly walking to my appointment instead of taking the U-Bahn.

When the sun shines in Berlin during winter, you got to capture it, bottle it, drink it in.

L'Chayim!

Merry Shabbat and Christmas Shalom!

Vow. Wow. Ow.

Unless you've been living under a rock (or are a graduate student scrambling to hand in her final paper) no doubt you've seen the shockingly tasteless Vows column in the Sunday New York Times about two married New Yorkers who met each other at their kids' school, fell in love, dumped their spouses and got married.

And again, unless you have been otherwise engaged, you've probably read at least some of the reader reaction and fallout to the piece which, gratifyingly, has mostly expressed shock, awe and total disgust.

You can (and probably have already) Google this to your heart's delight, but some of my fave reactions have been Jeff Bercovici's editorial on the Forbes site, Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams' smart and sassy observations and the following Tweet reproduced on the HuffPo:

@debwilker Deborah Wilker

@HuffingtonPost #vowsbacklash - nauseating, tasteless piece in the #NYT- perfect complement to this self-absorbed, nauseating couple

The Times piece is indeed entirely nauseating and insults the intelligence of human beings everywhere by reproducing Carol Anne Riddell's disingenuous claim that the two acted in a principled way and kept it platonic...then told their respective spouses that they were in love with other people:

“The part that’s hard for people to believe is we didn’t have an affair,” Ms. Riddell said. “I didn’t want to sneak around and sleep with him on the side. I wanted to get up in the morning and read the paper with him.”

The retarded thing is that of course the two were having an affair...of the emotional variety. They portray themselves as being powerless in the face of attraction but they actively stoked it along. They passionately pursued a flirtation that led to its logical conclusion: romance. This is called infidelity. For more on this subject, read M. Gary Neuman, a marriage counselor and author of several books on the topic.

It would have been one thing if both Riddell and Partilla were miserably married but that appears not to have been the case.

Here's the thing about marriage, especially when you have kids. With all that is great about it, there is also a certain amount of drudgery, lots of household management and criticism from your spouse. The person you are building a life with is sometimes cranky and combative, justifiably, or not. It is unrealistic to expect that he/she will find you constantly charming, attractive, witty, sexy and otherwise fabulous.

How flattering when someone laughs at your jokes after your wife raked you over the coals that morning! How irresistible when someone tells you that you are remarkable when your husband merely asks you to take out the recycling!

Sigh. This is the oldest, most pathetically cliched narrative. Stuck in the ho-humness of domestic life, a new person appears, making you feel supercharged and romantic and giddy and young and vital and intoxicated with life and possessed of the ability to see endless horizons and new possibilities.

She hangs on your every word, asks your opinion, makes you feel smart and powerful. He tells you how special you are, makes you feel cherished, less trapped. He sees the vital YOU that your dense husband fails to see.

Note to Carole Anne Riddell and John Partilla: If you're not going to be honest with the New York Times, at least be honest with the families you wrecked.

Platonic, shmatonic, atomic.

You dropped a nuclear bomb into the heart of two homes.

Dear Santa, um, Mom or the December 2010 Edition of Big Babe's Berlin Wishlist

Oh, dear.

A week from tomorrow I embark on my SIXTH trip to Berlin in half as many years.

The first couple of trips were untaken as an anxious mother who could not quite believe that her (Jewish) son had chosen to live in that place.

Somewhere around trip #3, Big Babe casually invited me to check out the club scene after an opera one evening and an obsession was born.

First came the Forward article -- on the expat scene in Berlin -- which ran last winter.

Now, the Masters thesis on the same topic, but far more scholarly and critical, focused solely on the Americans who have claimed Berlin as their new heim. Much of my research consists of hanging out, discovering the parameters of the expat scene. I don't know many people who can properly claim bars and clubs and art galleries and parties as the ground zero of their academic research.

Though my trip this past summer did entail a fair amount of work, next week's trip will be devoted entirely to research. Part of my mission is to figure out if and how the Americans in Berlin are impacting the life of the city and its inhabitants. What are they creating...other than a rousing good time? Is Berlin the 21st century version of 1920's Paris or merely a playground for the young and rootless?

To cut costs while in Berlin, already a highly affordable town, I will be crashing at Big Babe's place. Yesterday, he informed me that the running water in his flat was lukewarm to freezing. Normally, I'm not afraid of a bracing start to my day but when the outside temperatures hover below freezing and snow covers every possible surface, I really like my showers hot.

Last year, Big Babe's spacious digs were so cold that I slept in my coat, hat, gloves and shoes. My feet were constantly cold and damp and I drank about three times as much coffee as I normally do, just to keep warm. At night, I drank about 10 times as much wine as I normally would. When you're riding the U-Bahn home at 5 am, then walking several snowy blocks to your freezing abode, a high blood alcohol level is your best friend.

Armed with the certitude of being cold and uncomfortable, I am trying to carve out time this week to visit Uniqlo in SoHo to stock up on thin thermal underwear. Late at night, I'm scouring the Internet to find the ultimate fashionable yet toasty pair of black boots. The knit cap I scored for $10 from the vendor outside of Zabar's will not cut it this year. I need to trade it in for a Russian furry number, the kind that covers my ears, neck and chin.

According to family tradition, Big Babe has sent me his Berlin Wish-List, the artfully arranged accounting of stuff from New York that he simply cannot live without. Noting my ONE bag limit this year, I'm wondering how to accommodate his desires while avoiding overweight charges at the airport.

While I figure that one out, here is Big Babe's Berlin Wish List, the December 2010 Edition, plus a small addendum, which arrived in today's email:

- the small box of cds that I packed and left on the table
- the new Shteyngart (that is, if you've already read it)
- two additional books on the dining room bookshelf (roughly eye-level on the west-facing case): Ferdydurke and The Melancholy of Resistance
-my cowboy-ish leather coat (you know the one). It's too cold for it now, but will be perfect for spring!

I'll also keep my Zabar's wishlist modest:

- 1-2 lbs. french-italian whole bean
- hard salami (it doesn't need to be 40 lbs. this time!)
- chocolate rugaluch! (I still have 1/2 a babkah and need a change)
- Melindas!

and most importantly...

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YOURSELF!

From: "A.J. Goldmann"

Date: December 21, 2010 9:44:36 AM EST

To: Shira Dicker

Subject: Re: Behold! The midnight scream!

Ooh! One thing that I forgot that would be totally smashing if you could manage to pick up, is a 2011 Desk Calendar. I remember they go on sale at BN right before New Years. I prefer the New Yorker one, but the BN one is also perfectly satisfactory (and a bit cheeeeper).

love!

Adam