(Even right out of the box, the yellow tinge was clear as day.)

The most amazing part of  the Kindle Colorsoft launch fiasco is how quickly Amazon managed to turn eager early adopters (among them, many tech review influencers) into an angry mob. Wouldn’t you be angry, too, after paying $280 for Amazon’s first color e-reader, only to discover a permanent, inch-wide yellow tinge spread across the bottom of the screen?

I migrated to e-books ages ago. If I’ve read a book in the past decade, chances are it was on a Kindle device or in an iPad or iPhone Kindle app, or even on an ancient Barnes & Noble Nook. Like iPods and albums in the early 2000s, I loved and still love carrying my entire reading library around in my pocket or backpack. On the stand-alone devices, I always found the monochrome experience comfortably retro. I’m very Gen X that way.

But when Amazon did full-court press in mid-October to announce the new Kindle Colorsoft, my Scooby ears perked up. I may love me a good Kindle, but my autism is not a big fan of wading through a sea of black-and-white book covers in my Kindle library. Being able to browse a color library–and a color Kindle Store? Now that sounded like a real stress-tamer for me.

I took advantage of a juicy early adopter promo to trade-in my old Kindle Paperwhite for a $60 discount on a pre-order of a new Kindle Colorsoft and a $30 Amazon gift card. (Pretty good deal, I thought, for a device I originally paid $120 for.)

Two weeks later my new Colorsoft arrived. Immediately, using it felt joyful. Like reading a newspaper with full-color photos. Not tablet-like photos, not meant to be. A breath of fresh air to be able to browse my library in color–and I didn’t mind the slight haze that the new color display layer gave to text, either. That’s probably why I didn’t notice the yellow tinge at first–although it’s clearly there in the photo above this post that I took minutes after taking my Colorsoft out of the box and setting it up.

Then the complaints started popping up–and they never stopped. And a few days after loving my Colorsoft, I saw it. Some people say it gets worse over time–the yellow discoloration across the bottom, and sometimes sides, of the display. I play with my Kindle brightness and warmth options all the time, and I think that distracted me at first. But once you see the weird, prominent yellow bar across the bottom of the display–almost like someone wrote across the display with a yellow hi-liter–you can’t unsee it.

For people (clearly at this point, lots of people) who use their Kindle a lot, it quickly becomes very fucking annoying. Especially for a device that costs nearly three-hundred bucks. The only way not to see it, or be distracted by it, is to pump your display warmth up so that the yellow from the warmth blends in with the bottom stripe. But at that point, it’s like looking at your Kindle through a bucket of pee.

Tech news sites have now reported that a new optically clear adhesive used by Amazon on the Kindle Colorsoft display has unexpectedly aged early–turning yellow in the process. Which means it’s a hardware flaw–and one so glaring that it defies reason to believe Amazon didn’t know about it in advance. (Not unless they did no pre-release quality assurance testing whatsoever.)

It’s ridiculous Amazon went to market with the display flaw. Were they hoping no one would notice? Now reviewers are saying there won’t even be a hardware fix–Amazon may try to “fix” the hardware fault via a software patch. How? By making your whole display yellow? Or putting a black bar across the bottom of the screen? Either way, hard nope.

Lucky for us silly early adopters, Amazon has deigned to offer options for dealing with our broken Kindles. (Because sell me a $280 color e-reader with an accidental hi-liter color permanently across the screen and AFAIC that’s a broken e-reader.) And right on brand–for Amazon, anyway–they all suck.

Amazon is not reaching out to Kindle Colorsoft owners. You have to be angry enough to Google the problem for yourself–or run across the tiny blurb about the issue at the bottom of the Colorsoft product page. Those intrepid enough to manage to discover that they have any options at all, find out you have to request a call from Amazon Customer Service.

Once you figure out how to do that, a completely detached customer service rep calls to tell you, in the most monotone voice imaginable, that you can either return or exchange your dingy Kindle Colorsoft.

If you return it, you’ll wait 2 to 4 weeks for your funds to be processed back to you. If you exchange it, you can only do so for a new, hopefully corrected Colorsoft–and they’re not shipping for 3 to 5 weeks. (What does Amazon have against just saying, “About a month”?) Until then, you get to keep on using your faulty one.

If you want to exchange your Colorsoft for a different new Kindle model, now you’re really asking for the moon, aren’t you? Amazon will flat-out not process that for you in one transaction. Instead, you have to initiate a return–triggering that 2 to 4 week wait for your funds back–and purchase a different new Kindle separately. Which means, until your refund arrives, you’re essentially lending Amazon a couple three hundred bucks for a month for free.

And if you traded-in your old Kindle (like I did) for a discount on your new, pee-like Colorsoft, you better hadn’t dare want to return it, because fuck you, Amazon will not give you that value back. The suicidal customer service representative will, however, offer you a super-secret 20% discount code to purchase a new, different Kindle (that very definitely is not 20KINDLE2024.) But you’ll still have to do the return and new purchase separately. (And, of course, wait about a month–see how easy that was to say–for Amazon to give you your money back.)

All in all, the handling of this complete launch misfire has been unacceptably customer unfriendly. Amazon could make it so much easier for the people who placed pre-orders, traded in their old Kindles, and early adopted the Colorsoft to get their money back and get new devices. You would think they’d want to do that after all the hard promotion the Kindle management team did with tech media and influencers in mid-October. The whole point of that effort was to get those of us who purchased first to become brand ambassadors.

Instead, the nearly complete lack of proactive customer service for what is Amazon’s 100% own goal and no one else’s fault has turned most of us into naysayers. The Kindle Colorsoft product page is full of one-star reviews. (Including mine–it was originally a five-star review, but then, of course, all of the above.) That’s a lot of marketing money thrown down the toilet.

I originally considered exchanging my Colorsoft for a new one, and waiting about a month (oops, I used it again!) for it to arrive. But once I learned Amazon was considering not physically fixing the defect at all (I mean, how fucking cheap can you possibly be after screwing over your own long-term Kindle customers), I lost all faith in Amazon’s ability to deliver an acceptable color Kindle right now.

So today I initiated a return of my janky Kindle Colorsoft, and used the covert-agent 20% discount code to order a new 2024 Paperwhite. Amazon CHARGED ME A FUCKING DOLLAR to send me a return label, and at this point are you surprised?

They’re also making me buy my own shipping box at UPS. I feel like sending the fucked up little Colorsoft back in a shipping crate, like the time Amazon Fresh delivered me a single avocado in a giant shopping bag.

But they’d probably charge me extra for that, too.

__________

Update: Two days later, my replacement 2024 Kindle Paperwhite arrived. The entire bottom half of the display was yellow, far worse than the issue on my Colorsoft. It’s going back, too. There’s clearly a systemic hardware issue with the entire 2024 Amazon Kindle product line. Don’t buy one. 

(This post, Why I Returned My Amazon Kindle Colorsoft, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

(Photo: Different bridge, same exodus: my experience on 9/11. Credit: Joseph Rodruguez.)

(September 11, 2024) Over the years I’ve tried–and tried–to let it go. I’ve declared I’m moving on. I’ve ignored it until the moment of silence bells ring out on the morning news. It’s time to admit to myself it will always be a part of me. And I don’t want to forget. I want to remember. And I guess I always will. For posterity, here’s an evergreen version of the post I published way back in 2006 about my experience on the day that changed my hometown, and my life, forever…

__________

(September 11, 2006) The headline is a quote from my old New York friend, Sarah Massey, and one that speaks to my experience, as well. I rarely dote on that day. It’s been years since I stood on the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade at dusk, candle in hand, surrounded by thousands of my neighbors, mourning. I felt no need to watch the cable documentaries, nor for that matter Nicolas Cage crawling out from under a slab of concrete on the big screen. I was in Manhattan that morning–once was enough, thanks.

A native New Yorker’s devotion to their hometown is a fierce, almost irrational thing, rivaled only by a Chicagoan’s devotion to this great city. We don’t leave Gotham lightly. But it’s been five years since my hometown died for me, and almost four since I left it behind, perhaps for good. I’ll always feel the loss, but I don’t want to forget the day that caused it. I rarely tell my 9/11 story. I was only on the fringes of the hell that happened downtown. But I was in Manhattan. And I was part of the exodus.

I was halfway to work before I knew what was happening. Already, my inbound Q train wasn’t very crowded. Had I turned on the TV that morning I’d have known why. But I woke up late and wasted no time stumbling out the door. As we crossed the Manhattan Bridge, I thought it was odd that a group of people were pointing and staring out the windows on the south side of the train. I figured they were tourists. I didn’t looked up from my iPod.

That changed when we made our first stop in Manhattan. A woman boarded and spontaneously started talking about an airplane having crashed into the World Trade Center. I put away my headphones. I had a sinking feeling, which was rewarded one stop later when another new passenger joined the discussion and announced the second impact. Hers would be the first of many uses of the word “terrorism” that I would hear that day. She said we were under attack. At least we were underground.

I changed trains and headed up to my office above Grand Central Terminal. On the way, my train was delayed in the tunnel for several minutes, and I had the impression that every single person in my car was holding their breath. At my job, there was no work to be done. Everyone was crowded around the TV, watching the breaking news from Washington D.C., seeing smoke rise in split-screen above the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I had colleagues in the north tower. Judging by the impact hole I could see, I was sure they were dead. But I didn’t dote on that possibility, because our office sat directly in the shadow of the 60-story Met Life Building and I wasn’t waiting around.

Back outside, Midtown was surreal. People leaned on buildings, talking, or sat on the curb, crying. There was nowhere to go–the subways had stopped running. Instead, like elsewhere, people gathered around the nearest television monitor and watched the news. It was in a deli on Third Avenue where I saw the first tower fall. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming, it didn’t fully register until they replayed the tape. And still it didn’t make sense. It was incomprehensible, an icon of the capital of the world, erasing itself from existence in a matter of seconds. I had the momentary feeling that I was observing myself from without, and wondered if I was in shock.

That’s when the exodus began. With the primary means of moving about New York City–the subway–shut down, there was little else to do but walk, and the non-residential population of Manhattan began doing just that. Unfortunately, I lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and the direct path to get there from Midtown follows straight through lower Manhattan. So I knew I wasn’t going home. I decided to head for the home of my Portuguese friend, Jose. He lived in Elmhurst, Queens, six-and-a-half miles away. I started walking.

People with radios were talking about reports of transit buses being mobilized at the foot of the 59th Street Bridge to bring evacuees into Queens. I made my way to the bridge in an increasingly huge column of walkers. It seemed we all had the same idea. A mile later at the bridge, we found dozens of willing riders waiting, but no buses. Spontaneously, groups of people began wading into traffic, walking next to cars up the onramps to the bridge. A lone police officer tried in vain to stem the tide of pedestrians, but within a few minutes, several lanes of the bridge were taken over by thousands of walking evacuees, myself included.

We walked in traffic, next to cars and vans and delivery trucks overflowing with disparate strangers being ferried over the bridge by hundreds of Good Samaritan drivers. Walking next to the huge wheels of buses and trucks was the trickiest part. Halfway across the mile-long bridge, I looked south towards where the World Trade Center should have been. All that was left was smoke. A rumor went along the bridge that there were other hijacked planes and other targets in New York. We walked as quickly as we could to firmer ground.

There was little solace to be found when we reached Queens Plaza. Still with no subways and a trickle of buses, most of us just kept walking. I continued up Queens Boulevard, befriending for the moment a group of office workers from Midtown who were attempting to walk home to Long Island. They had a radio. We heard about the plane in Pennsylvania. Four miles later, before I finally turned off of Queens Boulevard at Jose’s house, I paused to consider the line of evacuees. Consuming the sidewalks on each side of the street, it stretched, in both directions, as far as the eye could see.

Cell service having long since evaporated, I arrived with no notice. Jose’s sister had just returned from retrieving her daughter from school in Brooklyn. She blew her car past emergency barricades on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and shadowed emergency vehicles to get there and back. The students had watched the towers fall from the roof of the school. I sat down for the first time in three hours and witnessed the TV images that the rest of the world had been watching since that morning (though to this day I refuse to watch footage of the jumpers). Jose was stuck safely at a work meeting in New Jersey and wouldn’t make it back to Queens for 24 hours.

The subway returned in the late afternoon, and I was able to travel to my friend Alan’s house on the other side of Park Slope, where he and his boyfriend, Esteban, were waiting. But it was slow going and lower Manhattan was off limits–a restriction assailed by one hysterical woman, obviously in shock, who complained to the conductor that she was going to miss her appointment on Chambers Street, a thoroughfare at that moment covered in ash fall.

When I emerged from the subway in Brooklyn, the cloud from Ground Zero hung directly overhead, as if a comet had passed by a just little too low. I collapsed into Alan and Esteban, and we all collapsed on the couch. We avoided the view from Alan’s living room window. Until that morning, it had framed a panorama of lower Manhattan gathered around the Twin Towers. We turned on the TV and started to write one of a million lists begun in New York that day to attempt to determine the whereabouts of our friends and colleagues who had worked in lower Manhattan.

Our task was made slightly easier when I saw two of my colleagues from the north tower in a news broadcast, walking slowly away from Ground Zero, covered in soot. It was the first moment in a very long day that I felt joy. Before I finally left for home, we also watched 7 World Trade Center burn and fall into itself.

I walked the 13 blocks between Alan’s apartment and my own with my shirt held over my mouth, a pose matching everyone else walking through Park Slope that night. The wind had changed. The acrid cloud from Ground Zero, intensified by the fall of the final building, was now hugging the ground through Brownstone Brooklyn. It was a sickening smell that would become familiar to all New Yorkers in the weeks ahead. A combination of burnt concrete and death, the odor would permeate the subway system well into 2002, every train through lower Manhattan carrying the stench to the farthest corners of the city.

Also in the weeks ahead would come the candlelight processions, the spontaneous vigils, and the walls of the missing–everywhere, the walls of the missing. That was the most overwhelming part. Not the masses of anonymous photos posted on the gate at St. Paul’s Chapel, but the single fliers you’d find taped to lamposts in your neighborhood bearing the familiar faces of casual strangers you’d smile at in the grocery store but would never see again. I didn’t let it in, at first. It would be five days before I would watch the St. Patrick’s Cathedral memorial ceremony, lie down on the floor of my apartment, and uncontrollably sob.

After 9/11, for a time, New Yorkers became less contentious and more united amongst themselves than usual. That didn’t last, but other changes were more enduring. Gotham became and stayed a city of fear, and swat teams, and bomb scares, and checkpoints, and pat-downs, and magnetic wands, and machine guns. I waited two years, but the machine guns never left. So I did.

Once, Devyn and I had a heated discussion regarding the experience of 9/11 in the world beyond New York–most specifically, in Chicago. Since I’ve been here, whenever the subject of 9/11 has come up, I’ve always been amazed at the lengths to which Chicagoans go to try, seemingly, to make that day theirs. Every one (including Devyn, when he lived here), remembers the shock, the fear, the evacuation of the Loop, the tense weeks and months immediately after. I’ve been unfair for a long time in my estimation of the local experience of that day. Truly, we all were changed by 9/11, and we all still carry the emotional scars from it, no matter where on the planet we were when we turned on the TV.

Seven years later the scars have, at least, begun to heal. But I can’t shake the nagging feeling that, for a minority of us, the wounds will never fully disappear. So I beg your forgiveness, but try as I might, there’s one thought I just can’t let go: the world may feel a tragic ownership of 9/11, but that day can never fully belong to those who watched it on TV or were evacuated from their own downtowns, terrified but safely afar.

In my mind and in my heart, September 11, 2001, will belong forever to the New Yorkers and Washingtonians who ran for their lives that day.

And to those who weren’t given the chance.

(This post, “On 9/11 I Lost New York” – But I’ll Always Remember, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

Meanwhile, we in Chicago have had two consecutive mayors going to war with businesses, restaurants, developers, and the news media, delegitimizing the concerns of White and Hispanic residents, systematically ignoring crime and dismantling the police force and policing tools, ignoring both the needs and impact of newly arriving refugees, allowing deadweight leadership to destroy a world-class transit system–and in the case of Brandon Johnson, shitting on more than a century of protecting our lakefront as a bedrock civic policy, being an overt and active antisemite, and being a completely inept political pawn.

None of that is new news. Every single major investor, developer, philanthropist, and corporation that has yanked their headquarters and their money from Chicago to elsewhere has cited these things, over and over and over. I’m thrilled we’ll soon have a state’s attorney who actually prosecutes crime. But that change is still months away. In the meantime, we’re left with a mayor who, incredibly, is even more toxic to the socioeconomic health and future of this city than the chronically wagging-fingered Lori Lightfoot was.

The Chicago I moved to in 2003, with its safe, livable downtown, vibrant neighborhoods where people didn’t fear to stroll from day into dusk, drive after dark, or take transit at all, with a City Hall that was a City Hall for Chicagoans of all colors, ethnicities, and backgrounds? The Chicago that wasn’t an international punch line? The one where you still felt secure about having a social life beyond daylight hours? Raising your kids? Growing old?

When was the last time you felt or thought any of those things about Chicago? How long before the pandemic did you realize Chicago was in trouble? Was it 2019, right before the world shutdown? Or 2016, when Kim Foxx stopped prosecuting shoplifters, muggers, and carjackers? For me, Foxx was the beginning of the end. But I held out hope and stayed put—through years of a plague wondering if we’d survive at all. Through all of Lightfoot’s pandering buffoonery. Because I’ve loved this city since the day I arrived, and thought it was worth the faith of biding time.

But how many years of your life should you wait for your city’s leadership to stop toxically destroying it before you realize those years could have been spent happier, safer, and less stressed out in other places that don’t have leaders who’ve decided to turn their cities into social experiments? When what you really deserved all along was simply to be able to walk to the corner for a beef and a coke without wondering if you’d make it back safely or at all?

Making an entire city as weak as its weakest neighborhoods will never lead to anywhere but hell. Supporting and nurturing what’s already working and helping that to grow and spread is a much better strategy, and the one that created the Chicago of the very recent past whose future is being irreparably destroyed.

This current Chicago, where after two consecutive Black Progressive mayors, every neighborhood gets to enjoy the fear and dread that before them only our worst neighborhoods got dragged down by? With that spread of dread being a point of political pride? “Look world–now everyone’s afraid to go out at night and all our philanthropists are moving to Miami!” What kind of fucked-up value signal is that?

It didn’t make our worst neighborhoods any safer, nor did it somehow teach our best neighborhoods some sort of lesson in identity politics. It just motivated the people and businesses with the money and skills that Chicago needs and has relied upon since its founding—investors and corporate leaders and residents alike—to leave, and made the ones who have always considered new lives here to reconsider coming at all. Whether anyone who isn’t them likes it or not.

No one owes Chicago a life here. Chicago doesn’t deserve anyone’s residency. Being a Chicagoan is a privilege that works both ways. It can be wonderful to have this place as your home. But the city is also enriched by those who stay. And staying is a choice. No matter how much Chicago needs all of its Chicagoans, the city can’t stop those who choose to flee for the sake of their own wellbeing. Endless mayoral tantrums full of class-shaming shouts of how dare you, and you owe it to residents less privileged than you, and your ZIP code means you don’t have real problems–and the ever popular but they’re just youth? Will never get a single person to stay.

They just remind the people who’ve decided to leave why they’re leaving.

Any why shouldn’t they? Why should people with means and choice keep wasting their safety and their nerves on a place that persistently and very publicly doesn’t care about their welfare? Especially when it doesn’t take very much in the way of means to go? If you really and truly want to get the hell out of Chicago, maxxing out the credit cards in your wallet and the cargo area in your SUV are pretty much all you need to do. More than 80,000 former Chicagoans have done it since 2020.

When I left New York for Chicago in 2003, I spent two solid years blissfully running around, checking off my bingo card of neighborhoods, restaurants, foodways, museums, gardens, and tourist attractions that to this day I believe were consistently on par with or better than the ones I left behind in the alleged capital of the world. I spent most of the next two decades happy that I lived on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, warmed by the sight of our skyline every time I returned by road, rail, or air. Which to this day I still point out never, ever happened to me one time upon returning to my native New York. (This weekend, in fact, I remarked this very thing to Ryan on the way back from Michigan wine country when the Loop came into view as we crossed the Skyway from Indiana.)

I have turned down job opportunities that would have brought me back “home” to New York. I reunited with my family after many years and still stayed put in this time zone. And although you may not believe it reading this, I don’t regret moving here and I don’t regret any of the time I’ve spent here. Not at all.

But moving here was in my thirties. Being here now is in my fifties. And there many things I want to accomplish, do, see, enjoy, celebrate, and be while I’m still on this planet that quite frankly I deserve to accomplish, do, see, enjoy, celebrate, and be without looking over my shoulder every goddamned time I walk out my front door. (Chicagoan reading this, you deserve that too, by the way.)

Enough is enough when it’s enough. There will be a day when you’ll get a blog update in your inbox or in your socials and read about where Ryan and I eventually decided to be–after we’re there. I won’t telegraph it and I have never been one for goodbyes. My transitions have always been like light switches. The stress-avoidant autistic in my likes it that way. I’m not saying my exit from Chicago will be tomorrow. But I am saying, with certainty, that it will be, and sooner rather than later. Until then, like the rest of us, I’ll do my best to keep my head down and make the best of it. 

The inevitableness I feel about it reminds be of what Democratic Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman said about the far-left Progressive movement. He takes pains to point out that he didn’t leave that wing of his political party. With all of its ideological change—change that he finds toxic—the movement really left him. 

Riding that magic carpet out of town is a lot less bittersweet when the rug’s already been pulled out from under you.

(This post, On My 21st Chicagoversary, I No Longer Have Faith in Chicago, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

Lillian, Walter, and I re-enacting my shock at the shittiest Rabbinic response I’ve ever experienced.

The ongoing pro-terrorism campus insanity keeps bringing me back to why Ryan and I were only members of an Evanston Reform synagogue that shall remain nameless (but IYKYK) for barely two months. I loved the two-hour, traditional Saturday morning service. Ryan liked the (barely any actual rubrics of a service at all) Friday night experience. But in the wake of October 7th, it was the standing toxic demand to keep allying with those who were publicly supporting our massacre (and obviously still are) that was the red line we just couldn’t cross. 

We originally planned to re-join Chicago’s Temple Sholom, our former mainline Reform synagogue in Lakeview where Ryan converted. (And we still may if and when the world regains its senses.) It was wonderful to be back there for a single service in October, but it was still so close in time to the terror attack in Israel, things just didn’t feel right yet. Our original synagogue, Emanuel Congregation–across the street from us and where I became a Jew 13 years ago–no longer has a rabbi, so that was off the table for us. When we re-affiliate, we want a community with a full complement of Jewish clergy.

One Sukkot long ago, we attended a service at the Evanston shul, notable for standing behind the right of its rabbis to speak their minds from the bimah without censure. It’s also the synagogue whose previous head rabbi (of blessed memory) executive-edited the current prayerbook of the Reform Movement, Mishkan T’filah. At the time, years before other local synagogues merged into the community, we didn’t find it a very friendly place, so we never went back. But that was then, and we wanted to keep shul-shopping for post-10/7 Jewish community, so we decided to give it another go.

Traditionalists that we are, the fact that Friday night services under the current lead rabbi never use that prayerbook anymore, even though there are dozens of them on shelves lining the entryway to the sanctuary, should have been a warning to us. (Though honestly, the tenuous connection of the shul’s highly abbreviated Friday night CountryClubKumbayafest® with any semblance of an actual Jewish service would have made using the prayerbook a largely futile effort, anyway.)

But the members, at least, were universally nice, and Ryan loves a low-impact Erev Shabbat and I a hardcore Shabbat morning. And the sense of post-10/7 Jewish community was very welcome in our lives. So we quickly joined, and we persisted. 

Until I got the rabbi’s back side. The only congregant or staff member not to be powerfully welcoming and friendly—or honestly, welcoming and friendly at all. We would not learn until a month into our membership about the raging controversy behind the scenes over a public op-ed penned in support of both-sidesism just days after October 7th. But words from the bimah and in official emails made it crystal clear that while the rabbi expected a wide berth for their public commentary, congregants were expected to think, act, and pray in liberal lockstep with far-left progressive ideals.

Any room for taking the time to heal after 10/7, or temporarily pausing allyship work? None at all. An overt and oppressive expectation—assumption, in fact—that the entire community stand with progressive groups—some of them anti-Zionist, some of them supporting groups already engaging in antisemitic words and deeds? Nonstop.

For a synagogue that has prided itself for decades on promoting free thinking, any evidence of that in practice was absent. By this point my personal politics were already changing, but even staunch Democrat Ryan was feeling out of place. From fellow members coming up to us week after week to privately share their own displeasure, we learned we were far from the only ones who felt that way. Longtime members told us they were aghast at the essentially enforced politics of the rabbi (hence the raging controversy)–and so many new members never stayed long enough to become old ones anymore, that the community was shrinking because of it. 

But being around fellow Jews after 10/7 was so important to us (like it was to so many of us), that we didn’t want to heed the handwriting on the wall. So we kept attending and participating. But I wasn’t shy about my march away from the Democratic Party on Facebook (although at the time I was still shocked about it.) I was never sure if that was the reason for what happened next. Or it could simply have been naked arrogance and bitchiness, because that was essentially all we got back from the bimah. Or maybe it was just a cliquish complete dislike for anyone new. (See again: Friday night CountryClubKumbayafest®.)

Ryan’s last service there was the week before mine. He doesn’t like to attend synagogue every week like I do, but he offered to drive me there and pick me up after services. When he saw the look on my face when he picked me up that Friday night, he knew.

It had been the usual odd-fest of an evening, but at least the drum circle with participatory percussion was engaging. (I know. I know.) After the service concluded, the rabbi stood at the exit from the sanctuary greeting and saying goodnight to congregants. I had been sitting with a lifelong member on one side and the congregation’s Membership Director (and former Synagogue Director) on the other. We all got along very well for two months. After saying goodnight to them, I joined the greeting line by the exit to say goodnight and happy birthday to the rabbi (as it was the rabbi’s birthday weekend.) To every long-term member, she was welcoming, friendly, and chatty.

To me, she immediately turned her back. I had said three words and in mid-sentence, she barked, “Thank you”, and turned 180 degrees so that my continuing sentence was met with her backside. No one else was talking to her, I had been at the end of the line. I kept speaking. She did not turn back around and never again acknowledged my presence. She made it deliberately clear, as a newcomer I was not welcome to speak to her.

There are many words I could use to describe behavior like that, but when it’s coming from the lead rabbi of your new synagogue where you are a paid member, making said rabbi your rabbi, the best one I can think of is reprehensible. Un-rabbinic? Un-Jewish? A shonda? Sure. But at the heart of it, completely reprehensible.

One day Ryan and I will have a synagogue wedding, hopefully with my New York nephews there in the sanctuary. That’s so important to us. And I will never forget thinking as I stared incredulously back at the rabbi’s ass, “I will never let you marry us.”

I told Ryan when I got in the car I was never setting foot in the synagogue again and why, and he was as shocked as I was. But after the experience of our previous two months there, not too shocked. Then I emailed the Membership director and resigned our membership. 

It was shortly after that pro-Palestinian activist groups and far-left progressive Jewish groups—the same ones the rabbi wanted us to stand alongside—started taking over downtown Evanston’s Fountain Square, waving Hamas flags, and chanting death to Jews. (The same groups that are now taking over public areas at Northwestern.) Before I unsubscribed, the synagogue’s emails began cautioning congregants to stay away from downtown protests, and alerting that information screens inside the building viewable from outside would no longer show sensitive information.

So when the Membership Director repeatedly asked me why we were leaving, I felt bad giving a fully honest response. I just said in the end we didn’t feel welcome from the bimah as new members with diverse views.

But “I think you have a fucked up rabbi” would have been a more accurate answer.

(This post, When the Rabbi Shows You Their Backside, Show Yourself Out, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

In the middle of our national flood of flagrant antisemitism from clueless college students, hateful Hamas supporters, and Nazi-in-training Democratic Progressives, this has become one of my favorite Passovers ever. Because I’ve finally done what five months ago I said I would–crossing the raging political waters to the other, safer side. Last week, someone on Facebook asked, in the shadow of the October 7th massacre, how will this Pesach be experienced differently than all other Pesachim. I answered, this year I’ll have a lot less sympathy for the Egyptians.

I spent the entire Trump presidency annoyed at my then-fellow Democrats. While I was still riding on the “let’s all measure our self-worth by our intersected identities” train, I could not stand the four years of sniveling, panicky, applied fear with which all of Democratic America so clearly decided to imbue every thought, every word, every prayer, every action. As if finding personal and communal self-respect and bravery was somehow completely impossible for anyone voting on the left side of the aisle to even conceive. 

I wasn’t thrilled with the politics of the moment. But I knew who I was. And I wasn’t—never have been and certainly am not now—a person who drives my entire human existence on a gas tank of fear of the entire world around me. As a party and a country, we lost so much potential—and so much self-respect—making a years-long project out of telling everyone how afraid we were. Did it really make anyone feel better? I hope so. Because not only didn’t it change a damned thing, but it made the entire era so much harder to deal with.

So I come to the post-10/7 era with some experience in realizing how to navigate a nation in which my measured worldview is at odds with a political movement that, once again, has gone completely fucking off the emotional rails. During Trump, the never-ending manufactured shock among Democrats that Republicans—after years of being told their perspectives didn’t matter—would dare to engage in ad hominem attacks on liberal politicians and voters was as non-credible as the equally nonstop Dem labelling of Republican policies as leading towards the end of America and American values. And don’t forget the choruses of “control the crazies in your own party” that went on and on and on and solved nothing.

And now, after Trump, under the Biden presidency, I’ve spent the past four years watching Democrats do the exact same things. Absolutely unrelenting ad hominem attacks from Democrats against Republican politicians and voters? Check. Refusing to deal with socially, economically, and national security critical situations and policies for the party’s political gain? Check. 

Out in public, vociferous refusals to check the crazies in their own party as the Progressives went from canceling the police to canceling border security to canceling Jewish Americans? Check. When Democrats in Congress repeatedly gave Rashida Tlaib’s Jew-hate a pass, the hypocrisy could not have been in fuller view. 

And, of course, it was the Republican Congress that finally—and rightfully—censured her.

Formerly Progressive Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman has said that he didn’t leave the Progressive movement, the movement—by dint of its increasingly hateful and un-American far-left ideology—left him. I share his ideological journey. As a matter of fact, I do believe antisemitism, weakened policing, and porous borders tear at the social, economic, and, frankly, moral fabric of the United States.

However, Democrats refusing to raise guardrails around around their own Progressive members and allowing them to lend credibility to a one-note ideological protest movement that supports a terrorist organization that literally states if you’re Jewish, your life doesn’t matter, and that you and your co-religionists should be killed in America and around the world? A movement that puts that kind of genocidal hate into action to attack, bully, demean, and instill fear in American Jews—and spreads that Jew-hate throughout downtowns and across campuses? While Progressive politicians and university presidents overtly place such ideology over protecting life?

This is exactly the kind of nakedly hateful, bullying, thisclose to murderous national outcome that Democrats spent the entire Trump presidency accusing the Republican Party of fostering. Except it’s the Democratic Party that actually got us here. I have a post-political friend now living in Europe who used to say she didn’t trust either party, because at their base, neither was truly on the side of actual Americans, or sought anything other than the continuation of their own political power.

But that’s not true, is it? Because Republicans didn’t come for the Jews. Democrats did.

That’s it for me. If Democrats as a party institutionally refuse to stand up to their own, nationally activated Progressive Jew-hate, that makes the Democratic Party a party of Jew-hate as a whole. Which means the only way to stand up to Progressive Jew-hate and protect American Jewish lives is to stand up to the Democrat party, itself. So for the sake of my own Jewish life and the lives of my fellow Jewish Americans, I cannot and will not any longer support the Democratic Party at all.

In fact, since 10/7, the only party that has consistently and unwaveringly stood up to antisemitic university leaders, stood against violent street and campus protests, and sought to enact legislative and regulatory barriers and consequences against institutionalized antisemitism is the Republican Party. (It’s also very worth noting, the only media platform that has consistently and unwaveringly covered those violent protests–at all, and more importantly from a Jewish lens that labels antisemitism for what it is and antisemites for who they are—is Fox News.)

I no longer support or have any faith in the Democratic Party, nor buy into Democratic—much less Progressive—tropes about Republicans or the Republican Party. I am now officially a registered Republican voter. I voted in the Illinois Republican Presidential primary for Nikki Haley. In November, I’ll vote for whomever is the national Republican presidential candidate—including Donald Trump. And I will continue to support GOP candidates—while voting strategically within my new party—over the long term.

Does all of that shock your Progressive sensibility regarding ongoing national struggles for women’s reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights and transpeople rights in particular, immigrant rights, and the fights against racism and xenophobia? Will it make all of those efforts harder if Jewish Democrats walk away from the party entirely? Or swing voters?

Hmm. Maybe you should have supported Jewish Americans a little better over the past six months.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This Passover, I am unapologetically a socially liberal, fiscal and national security conservative Republican. I can fight within this party for the social outcomes I support (as many Republicans do—see: Arizona and the fight for abortion rights), including all of the above. But I will no longer do it through a morally toxic “identity-intersected colonialism” lens. I’ll do it through a Jewish one. And that means that I’ll do it in the party that hasn’t allowed 46 percent of its Congressional members to call for the destruction of Israel and for physical harm to befall American Jews. 

If my political choices have you screaming at your screen, you’re probably an antisemite. If you believe that Americans should be harassed for the actions of a country of which they aren’t citizens and where they don’t live simply because of a common religion, you’re definitely an antisemite.

And I assure you, in the GOP that’s still a pretty fucked up thing to be.

(This post, A Republican Jew on Passover, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

Walter isn’t ready for the day right now.

Two months on from the October 7th massacre, many Diaspora Jews feel torn between a hardcore need for self-care and urgings by some Jewish community leaders to continue the work of social justice as a form of healing. Those community leaders are wrong.

After the greatest mass murder of Jews and the accompanying greatest rise in antisemitism since the Holocaust, the world is as different post-10/7 as it was the day after 9/11. It took a long time for some New Yorkers to let the impact of that day settle in. I still remember a woman complaining loudly on the E train later that afternoon that the train would be skipping the station she needed in lower Manhattan—even though that station had been crushed underneath two falling, 110-story skyscrapers hours before.

It’s like that right now in the Jewish community. Psychologically and emotionally, we’ve all been horrendously impacted by 10/7. But some of us refuse to acknowledge that the world is different now—and at least for right now, so are we.

The different streams of denominational Judaism diverge in the weight they each give to the 613 Jewish mitzvot (commandments)–individually and as a whole. But we all feel a pull towards tikkun olam—engaging in efforts to help heal the world. For many liberal Jews (and that’s liberal about the commandments, not politics), tikkun olam is at the center of our Jewish identities. That’s why we engage so deeply in social justice. 

The Talmudic tractate Pirkei Avot, often loosely translated as Ethics of the Fathers (it’s really Chapters of), contains Rabbi Hillel’s famous teaching (Pirkei Avot 1:14): 

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?”

Jews for centuries have engaged in tikkun olam with those words echoing in their heads. But the social justice, allyship, and advocacy efforts of liberal Jews throughout the 20th and 21st centuries have been very specifically a response to this urging by Hillel to be a proud Jew who also stands for others and does so right now if not sooner. And if we feel lazy about it, we also love to give ourselves a moral kick in the can with Pirkei Avot 2:16:

“He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say: It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it…”

These are bedrock Jewish moral targets and I don’t question their necessity. I do, however, question their timeline. When the largest loss of Jewish life in eight decades happens, how long does Now last? Is there a reasonable answer to When? How wide does our tent have to be to ensure that we aren’t for ourselves alone? And what defines—and doesn’t define—neglecting the work? 

Because a lot of things have to happen in this particular Now beyond the work of tikkun olam. Or to reframe that work, right now, surely tikkun olam must begin with the healing of us, our Jewish selves, first. After 9/11, it took years for some New Yorkers to feel like themselves again. Years to move forward. Years to stop feeling terrified. Some of us accomplished that by leaving New York and never looking back. (See: me in Chicago for the past nearly 21 years.) Some still haven’t stopped hurting. Some still haven’t found a way to forgive. And none of us will ever forget.

Such is the world for Jews after 10/7. It’s going to take time—a lot of time. We’re all broken in some way. Some of us will get our feet back under us faster than others. Some will need years. Some won’t ever be the same. And the work and the time and the journey that will be required to recover and heal as best we can are not things to be taken lightly. Yet in some quarters within our community, we are expected to pick up the task of social justice and stand with others who right now are still letting us know they don’t value our allyship—or in many instances, our very lives—at all.

So if not now, when? At this particular moment, it’s okay to answer with Later. Later when I am able. Later when I am healed. Later when I can find a way to trust others again. Later when others value my Jewish humanity again. Later when I am no longer terrified. Later when I get my wholeness back. Later when I am at least less broken. But right now I need to be for myself, so that I can continue to be here at all.

And I don’t want to be alone right now, but I know I have my Jewish community to comfort me. And until I feel able to stand with others in the wider world, I can stand with my community. There’s obviously an outstanding need for Jews to embrace each other in community right now. And there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it what’s we should have been doing all along.

And if your journey to healing is so fraught that you can’t find a way back to wider allyship, your life, and health, and healing are most important. If after 10/7, your answer has to be Not Anymore, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. As Jews, we are meant to do our best, but we are not meant to be martyrs. There are enough toxic calls to martyrdom in the world right now. And there are enough Jewish hands and Jewish hearts to take up the slack while we’re all on our differential healing timelines.

For the sake of self-healing, for the sake of community healing, Now is going to take as long as it takes. It’s okay to let it.

(This post, If Not Now, Later Is Okay Too, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

“Am Yisrael chai. (The People of Israel live.)”

I am a Jew, first and foremost. Everything else—my Hispanic origins, my place of birth, my current home, my autism—is secondary, and always will be.

I am a Zionist Jew. I support Israel’s right to exist, to remain, to defend itself, to engage in wars that are just from a Jewish perspective, and to expect support from Diaspora Jewry.

I am an affiliated Jew. The overwhelm and stress of my (then undiagnosed) autism dividing me from my former synagogues—and the long pandemic years without a shul—came to an abrupt end after October 7th. Having a community of fellow Jews in my life and a place to daven Friday nights and Saturday mornings, I finally feel like myself again and, given the circumstances, feel guilty that I’m filled with so much joy at returning to being a practical part of my people.

I am a repentant Jew. For years, I took Israel and Israelis for granted. The importance of the Jewish state and its Law of Return as the single guarantor of life and safety for worldwide Jews. The lives, hopes, fears, and hard realities of Jews in Israel. Their need for Klal Israel to stand by them. They needed me every time I looked away. I love them and I’m sorry. I’ll never not have their backs again.

I am a Republican-leaning Jew. I will likely vote in the Republican primary, and I will likely vote for a Republican president.

I was a Progressive Democrat Jew. My support for the ideology waned as the far-left fringe of the party made antisemitism the required virtue signal for belonging. It collapsed completely after the American Progressive response to the October 7th massacre was to celebrate it in the streets.

I am a Jew who knows our allies pulled this same shit in 1967. Last time, we decided to forget. This time, let’s make sure we remember.

For that reason, I’m a Jew whom you probably can’t get back on “your side.” Republicans uniformly understanding that “from the river to the sea” welcomes Jewish genocide—and opposing it vehemently—is why. Democrats repeatedly giving their own members a pass on Jew hate—from Obama on Iran to the Tlaib censure vote on November 7th—is why. Support for Israel becoming the litmus test for a GOP presidential candidate is why.

I’m a Jew who is politically well aware of everything else. But as long as the Democrats demand that to be a good Jewish Democrat means agreeing that the world can kill you for being a Jew, my big Jewish, gay, Hispanic, immigrant-family, autistic ass will choose my literal life and the life of my people first among Republicans, and argue about everything else later. 

I am a Tablet Jew. I feel every single article in the magazine’s blunt, post-massacre What Now? issue.

I am an AIPAC Jew. After October 7th, my vote involves one thing and one thing alone—the security of Jews. Jews in America. Jews in Israel. That’s it. That won’t ever not be the most important thing again. 

I am not a J Street Jew. I’m not opposed to the idea of a two-state solution in principle. But in practice, it seems clear that idea died in the massacre alongside more than 1,200 innocent Jewish civilians, families, children, elderly. 

I am absolutely not a Jewish Voice for Peace Jew. Anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Hard stop. My Jewish tent will never be wide enough to support them or their toxic aims.

In a broad sense, I’m also no longer a social-justice Jew. My community matters to me, and there’s enough unearned hate aimed at it and need for healing within it to monopolize my attention for the rest of my life. I spent too many years as an ally to others who showed who they and their movements really are in the past month. Since Progressives want my people dead anyway, I’m sure their causes will do just fine without my allyship.

I am a surprised Jew. I never expected my identity, worldview, and politics to all suddenly and wrenchingly shift inside me in the course of a single, awful day, nor for them all to arrive at their current destination. I know a similar shift happened for every Jew on earth that day. I know we’re all still shuffling inside and trying to find a way to figure out who we are now. Who we want to be now. How to move forward now. I know I’m not alone.

And I am a proud Jew. I stand behind where I find myself on my Jewish journey right now. If you support my stance, great. If you don’t, great. Change my mind. Or not. It’s between me and HaShem anyway. The important point is that it’s a JEWISH journey. I struggled with it as we Jews do, I didn’t get here blindly. 

Nearly three years ago, when I finally found out about my autism, an autistic Jewish friend bet me that Jewish topics would fall away and my blog would thenceforth become all about autism…

.אין מצב

(This post, A Jew with Corrective Lenses, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

The turn of spring to summer is my dual Chicago anniversary. I’ve written this blog for 18 years. And I’ve lived in my adopted City of Chicago for 20.

As I told StoryCorps years ago, Chicago happened for me because of 9/11. As I’ve now known since 2020, running away from my native New York City was really an attempt at escaping my then-unknown autistic anxiety.

A decade ago, on my tenth Chicago-versary, I retold the story of visiting here six times in three months in early 2003, then being guided by my now-international Media Goddess friend, Sarah, “New York will always be there, but if you don’t give Chicago a try, you’ll never know.”

It’s been quite the ride so far—with those last two words being particularly weasely. I thought I ’d only be here a couple of years, but even with all of this city’s post-Lightfoot/post-pandemic problems (and, if you’re connected with me on Facebook, my social-media bitching thereof), this stopover increasingly looks a lot more like a lifelong one.

There’s been so much happy, so much anger, and so many positive civic engagements, so much Marina City, so much transit, so much Judaism, so much Disney, so much going local, so much reconnecting since 2003. And somehow my early thirties became my early fifties.

If there’s a single post that sums up the journey and why I’m still here, it’s this one. The story of the two types of native New Yorker, told on Marina City’s 61st-floor roof deck. Most of them are too afraid of the rest of the world to ever leave the five boroughs. But some of us understand New York is nothing but the center of itself, and go looking for the world’s real center. For the past 20 years, I’ve found that center in Chicago.

For worse or better, I still do.

Five years ago in the before times, I dropped a popular piece on Quora about why Chicagoans—native or not—stay, irrespective of winter and local woes. On this side of the pandemic, in these fraught times in this battle-weary city, it’s a useful reminder to me why I’m still here. Maybe it’s a reminder you need, too. This is who we used to be here.

And I believe, for worse or better, we still are…

__________

Speaking as a native New Yorker who has lived in Chicago for the past 15 years, I’ll put it more simply. Chicago is the city New Yorkers wish New York was, and constantly complain that it isn’t—in the same breath that they claim they “couldn’t live anywhere else.”

Chicago is cleaner everywhere, has more elbow room everywhere, everything across the board is less expensive. It’s much easier to find your way around with a far simpler and nearly universal grid system. It has cheaper, cleaner, and far more reliable public transit that never stops running in winter storms, and far cheaper and far fewer tolls.

People feel an ownership of downtown instead of feeling unincluded there. Chains haven’t taken over every local neighborhood shopping street. Amazing ethnic neighborhoods are all across the city, and aren’t punishingly crowded to visit.

Local/small-scale arts and theater still thrive here, and people get out of work on time all the time to enjoy them. Our airports (yes, even O’Hare) don’t suck and flights anywhere in the country are only 2 to 4 hours long.

We have 26 miles of almost unbroken urban parkland abutting an alarmingly enormous inland sea–that coastal critics always complain “isn’t the ocean” until they’re standing on a crowded lakefront beach in the middle of a sweltering Chicago summer with their jaws on their knees and saying silly things like, “It’s like Los Angeles!” (Literally said to me about our beaches by an Angeleno his first time here.) No, it’s like Chicago.

The local culture of niceness is like Midwest niceness on steroids. We like each other and talk to each other here as strangers all the time with no problem doing it. And because our lives aren’t inhumanely expensive, we aren’t grouchy all the time and afraid of making ends meet every month. These last two things really define the vibe of daily life here. Unlike my hometown, you don’t spend every day feeling like you’re fighting against millions of other people just to tread water. There’s a real sense of all being in it together. Our communities, from the most local and granular to the level of us all being Chicagoans, are tight that way.

That’s why we stay. That’s why we put up with government corruption and budget disasters. That’s why we stay and try to find solutions to underfunded police and fire departments, public schools, and youth summer jobs programs. It’s not easy or pretty, but life isn’t without challenge anywhere else in America either. We stay because so many things about this place make us care enough to stay. And that’s something I think outside observers ALWAYS miss about Chicago.

In 15 years, I’ve had ample opportunity to move home to NYC (including an amazing job offer) or to move on to other cities, and I’ve had my share of moments and even years of not being in love with this place. But Chicago always manages to embrace you and pull you back. Because it cares to.

As far as winters go, everybody everywhere complains about their climate, including Southern Californians and Floridians. There is always something. Before I left my New York City hometown, people complained about those allegedly mild winters every year, all winter long. Chicagoans complain like everyone else. The difference is that we don’t ever let weather stop us. We dress for the weather and go out and enjoy our city whether it’s 90° F in the heart of August or 10° F in the heart of January. That’s another thing that people who aren’t from here constantly misunderstand. We don’t huddle from our climate. We just continue to enjoy and embrace this place that embraces us back.

And, of course, the punchline is that we do all of this and experience all of this and get to have all of this in an alpha-level world city (just below the top tier of New York and London and Tokyo) with all of the cultural, and gastronomic, and educational, and economic, and international amenities that you would expect to find in a world city anywhere else on the planet. After 15 years here, I can tell you with no exaggeration that almost every “If only…” I ever heard about New York City in my more than three decades of living there as a native described something about Chicago that was missing in New York.

Which brings me back to my original point. Chicago is the city New Yorkers constantly complain that New York isn’t. Since most people asking “What is Chicago like?” questions are from big coastal cities who have never been to Chicagoland other than passing through an airport, this answer should probably resonate for a lot of people.

__________

It definitely still resonates for me.

(This post, Why I’ve Stayed in Chicago for 20 Years, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

Hey, 1999 version of me in Lisbon, do I have something to tell you…

The title of this post is one of the main things I remember my autistic Angeleno friend, Adam, saying to me on Christmas Day in 2020. On a Zoom call in the middle of a pandemic, he pep-talked me down from the ledge of my 24-hours-old autism diagnosis. The other thing I remember him telling me: “I always knew; I was just waiting for you to know, too.”

Like all of us, I didn’t suffer the pandemic gladly. Stir-crazy at home with also stir-crazy Ryan while the world outside switched off and stayed off limits. Hoping not to drop dead, then hoping to find a drug store with shot appointments. Never learning how to wear a mask without fogging up my glasses. Perfectly nailing how to day drink on a work Zoom. (Sip your Merlot from a coffee mug and blow across the top like it’s hot. You’re welcome—use this power wisely.)

2020—or as I think of it, The Year of Living Madly—was at least a great time to take stock. What the fuck else was there to do? I turned 50 in August over an Entenmann’s cake with a candle in it. We canceled our 10th anniversary vacation because every Disney park on the planet was closed. Eventually, like the world outside, I shut down, too. I stopped writing. (You literally have not seen a new word here in more than three years.) I started melting down over the most mundane things. I walked away from a job that didn’t fit me. Honestly, it was the most stressful year of my life.

But not by much. And when I finally realized that, the floodgates opened. Had I ever really felt like I fit in anywhere? Had I ever not been one stress trigger away from erupting into a shattered mess or shutting down into a tightly curled ball? To this day, my fellow 1980s alumni from Gay and Lesbian Youth of New York remember me as Angry Doyle. Had I ever really connected? Or ever, really, been happy? As long as I hadn’t dropped dead yet, I suddenly, finally, really wanted to know why.

A long-ago therapist diagnosed me with ADHD, but that label never really fit. There was always so much more to it for me. But what? I went searching and re-searching through all the ADHD literature I could, trying to find the key. And then I remembered long-ago friend Esteban’s words, shared with me on a Brooklyn stoop in the early 2000s. “Have you ever considered that you might be autistic.” At the time, he was a state crisis-intervention psychiatrist. I ignored him.

You can see where this is headed. But until 2020, I didn’t.

The memory of Esteban’s words were like a halogen lamp switching on above my head. I didn’t yet know for sure I was autistic. But inside, there wasn’t a doubt. I switched literatures and read myself blearly eyed about autism. I took every official and unofficial autism self-diagnostic imaginable, with every score as close to off-the-charts as they could be. And I started seeking a diagnosis. (Which, for adults, isn’t easy to accomplish and is depressingly expensive.)

On Christmas Eve of 2020, I had my answer. Michael, meet your diagnosis. It starts with an A and ends with an OMFGWTF. As a Jew, I wasn’t really looking for a Christmas gift. But there it was. And frankly, it was terrifying.

You don’t really want to let it in at first. But when I finally did—and I mean this literally—I watched my life flash before my eyes. Every second suddenly made sense, knowing that I experienced them as an autistic. It’s hard to describe the intense mix of clarity, mourning, shame, and liberation of that moment. I’ve spent the past two and a half years unpacking it all.

The clarity of knowing I have an autistic brain and neurology, and experience the world—and always will—through that lens. The liberation of knowing that being autistic is natural and normal. The needless, unearned shame associated with the condition that took a while to let go of. And the mourning of realizing who I always thought I was never really existed in the way I thought he did.

That last part was hardest of all—it was as if my sense of self just popped like a balloon. It took me months to figure out who I really am and how I want to be in this world as the autistic human being I have always been. I decided I would leave my blog dormant until the day I got my clarity back about that, too.

And here we are. Did you miss me? I missed me, too.

On the web for a while I’ve used the hashtag #ActuallyAutistc without yet explaining my journey. And although, two and a half years past diagnosis, I know how much of a hate group Autism Speaks is (you can Google for yourself “Autism moms” silencing actual autistic adults), I’m not here to Stan for autism.

We say if you’ve met one autistic, you’ve met one autistic, but I will share some of my autistic traits which many others have in common. I now know my ability to handle stress works in slow motion, so I have to carefully manage my triggers to not end up melting down or shutting down. (And all that anger with past synagogues now makes SO much sense.)

Noise canceling headphones and pulled curtains are life to me—sudden loud noise and sudden light glare are my anxiety-inducing Kryptonite.

My mother was always right—I do see everything in black and white terms. I am very logical but often also absurdly literal.

I will never look you in the eye while we’re talking. I expect you to smile while I infodump. Being a hardcore Disney Parks whisperer now makes 100% sense. So does my superhuman power of hyperfocus and my ability to zero in on patterns to solve problems in immediate and complete ways that often literally shocks people when they witness it.

I stim (insert your second trip to Google here) all the time—and it was quite a surprise to realize I always have. I am always casually rocking, or engaging in echolalia, or flapping my hands when I’m happy. Incredibly classic autistic behaviors—and I’m so happy they’re mine.

There’s so much more, but that really would be infodumping, so maybe my blog will become more about autism. But knowing what I know now about myself—just go ahead and re-read it. It’s pretty clear it always has been an autistic blog. Because I’ve always been what I am.

And that is, autistic. You can keep your “person-first” language. I am not a “person with autism”. As with all autistics and all people, my terminology is my choice. My disability doesn’t need your uncomfortable euphemizing of it. My autism and myself are inseparable. At this point, I very much like it the way. It hasn’t been an easy two and a half years.

But unexpectedly enough, they’ve been the most promising two and a half years of my life.

(This post, “I Bet Your Blog Becomes All About Autism”, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

No, we’re really not celebrating Passover this year. I have a feeling, we’re not alone in this decision, either. I have another feeling that others who have made the same decision as us aren’t being vocal about it. (In the same way that masses of fellow liberal Jews who decide, like us, to eat on You Kippur keep that quiet, too.) So, much as I decided to blog about why we choose not to fast on Yom Kippur (seven years later still a very popular post), I think it’s important to share with other why we’re passing on Pesach during this troubling time of coronavirus.

Passover has always been a time of great Jewish introspection for Ryan and me. My first Passover post-conversion ended with an A-Ha! moment over an illicit sandwich. A later Pesach found us finding our holiday groove. In the intervening near-decade, we also struggled with celebrating a 7-day holiday in the Diaspora and observing Passover after leaving our shul.

In fact, this isn’t the first time we’ve given Pesach a pass. When my family and I reunited after 20 years apart in 2015, we stopped all our holiday preparations, happily re-embraced chametz, and traveled to NYC to be with them. So there’s precedent.

But this time, this night is different from all other nights for us for a less joyous reason–and that reason is the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This week, can you really wrap your mind around thanking God for sparing us from plagues during a plague? I can’t. Can you find the place in your heart harboring gratitude and joy for our liberating journey into the desert? There’s not a rousing-enough round of Dayenu! in the world for me to make my emotional way there right now.

When more than a million people are infected with a disease that has already killed nearly a hundred thousand (and memo to self–come back here in a year and see how heart-breakingly dated these numbers will likely be)–and the world epicenter is now my hometown where my family lives… Not grateful. Not sorry.

When Ryan and I have spent weeks making sure our pantry and household staples are well-stocked for the long haul–fridge, freezer, pantry shelves, linen closet comfortingly full of an extra two-weeks of everyday necessities–most of it chametz-laden… Where to hide it all to follow the letter of the law? More importantly, where to stock a week of Kosher-for-Passover replacement items, honestly, at all?

As my awesome Afghanistan-vet niece, Jennie, said, they always waited for civilians to understand what PTSD is really like. Now we’re all living with it. Does the ephemeral really want us to add to this worldwide collective traumatic experience by–literally–rocking back our preparations for it in order to avoid leaven? Is the penalty for eating chametz over Pesach really Karet (spiritual excision), when the penalty for accidentally bringing coronavirus-contaminated supplies into your family’s kitchen might be equally final?

We’ve always shopped weekly, based off a meal plan and a detailed list I create in advance. (Who knew becoming a home cook 15 years ago would be so useful in a pandemic?) We eventually shifted to grocery delivery like the rest of the world. But having to wait days for a delivery slot now (or even for the ability to shop online at all), we’re back to weekly shopping in person. I slap my pillowcase mask on my face and head into the stores. Ryan remains in the car with the hand sanitizer.

I’ve seen some crazy things since sheltering-in-place began a few weeks ago. People wearing produce bags as gloves, welding face-gear as masks, and there was that clueless woman who kept wiping her nose and then touching all the (now-priceless) toilet paper packages at our local Whole Foods. But the worst I’ve seen has been at the famed “Jewel on Howard”–our preferred nearby megamarket that happens to have one the largest kosher sections at any commercial chain supermarket in all of Illinois.

In ordinary times, it’s our unquestioned go-to for Jewish holiday foodstuffs and supplies. Its kosher aisles are ordinarily filled with large Ultra-Orthodox families–parents and children–shopping together. These are often families belonging to very politically conservative Ultra-Orthodox communities. If we had a nickel for every Trump-positive, news media-damning bumper sticker we’ve seen on the vehicles of these fellow Jewish families, we’d have a very alarmingly large amount of money to weather the growing national economic crisis.

The disturbing thing is–they’re still shopping as extended families. Parents and children, no masks, touching everything, believing that COVID-19 is a hoax and/or that prayer is all that’s necessary to avoid it. Think I’m kidding? This is exactly why Israel began quarantining the nation’s strict Ultra-Orthodox Charedi communities (and here, and here) before any others. In fact, according to Israeli newspaper of record Ha’aretz, as of today Ultra-Orthodox Jews account for 75% of COVID-19 cases in Jerusalem.

This is heartbreaking, frightening, maddening, depressing, and frankly, unsurprising. Thanking God for delivering us from a plague, during a plague, if you can stomach it, is probably the most Jewish thing you can do. Judaism’s religious extremist communities dismissing the ongoing plague in the first place, thus literally helping to spread it? That’s something else entirely.

Judaism places the sanctity of life above all else. Above Shabbat (the weekly Sabbath), above ritual and observance. Above all other concerns. My Jewish concerns during this pandemic involve the safety of my loved ones–my family in New York City, Ryan and myself here in Chicago, and  Walter and Lillian Disney Cat, while I’m at it. Maintaining the sanctity of our physical health is important. Maintaining the sanctity of our mental health is important. Maintaining the sanctity of our emergency pantry is important.

Avoiding five types of grain by body checking my way through masses of coronavirus-doubting families to amass a weeklong mirror pantry of religiously permitted items in order to avoid a Biblical religious penalty that can no longer be applied because we haven’t had a Sanhedrin (religious court) in 1,500 years, and that liberal Jews don’t hold by anyway?

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

May those of you observing Pesach this year be and stay healthy and safe. May your Zoom Seder conferences be secure and free from porn-bearing intruders. (Unless that is your jam, in which case, self-select and go for it–you know who you are.) Enjoy some brisket, and matzoh bark, and Joyva Jell Rings for me.

We’ll be having chicken paprikash over egg noodles tonight. Real egg noodles, with no Seder plate in sight. Given the circumstances, we’re good with it. Pretty sure God will be, too.

To next year in Chicago, or wherever our travels may bring us all.

(This post, Passing on Passover: The Pandemic Edition, appeared first on CHICAGO CARLESS.)