atoned?

i decided, more or less at the last minute, not to go home for yom kippur. that feeling of Community i'd been craving was sated nicely by my visit home for rosh -- & tempered as well by the stress of quick-turnaround travel. travel sucks. quick-turnaround travel sucks worse.

so i stayed here. ben did too and we observed together, finding a free kol nidre service in a gym around union square. i wore my rubber sandals, he shuffled in his blue bedroom slippers. as we passed unconscious swells in restauarants and nightclubs, together we thought, "goyim."

the next day, in a nod to convenience, we returned to our leather shoes and walked circles around our neighborhood. the lower-east side, the east-east village, all the way to the east river and back. beautiful weather kept us going. later, i got sick. fasting makes me sick -- i need to remember this, because returning sick from ben's grandma's apartment at 181th street, where we broke fast, was not fun. a long subway ride followed by a long nighttime walk through the smoking, skinny west village crowd, shaky and trying to hold the bile down: even if the fast shouldn't be easy, as our free kol nidre service rabbi reminded us, surely it shouldn't result in the pity of hipsters.

i wish my body weren't so fragile. god knows it looks sturdy.

good luck to little adam, just jubliantly installed in his favorite country, and to everyone else, cuz we all need it, don't we?