What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

One of my dad’s best pieces of parenting advice had been very simple: wait. He didn’t tell me to abstain from sex and drugs forever, which I’m sure would have made me try everything immediately. He just told me to take a beat, watch my friends try things out, learn what to do and what not to do based on their mistakes and triumphs, and then try out what I was going to try.

One of my mother’s favorite pieces of advice, based on a week she spent in the Singapore Mandarin Oriental with the flu, was that when you find yourself sick in a foreign country, ignore the cost and check yourself into the nicest hotel in town. High-end hotels have doctors on call, room service, and daily clean sheets, and accept credit cards. Since Sasha had basically grown up in my house, she and I had heard this advice from my mom as many times as we had heard her say, “Look both ways before crossing the street,” “Nordstrom’s has the best shoe sales,” and “Always carry twenty bucks for a cab and I.D. so they can identify the body.”

The experience also illuminated another fact: regardless of how you travel, as you get deeper into your thirties you might be the only person your age out on the road at all, whether it’s in the hostels with the twentysomethings, or on the fancy cruises with the sixtysomethings. In your fourth decade, your compatriots are mostly at home, working, raising humans, getting husbands through rehab, living for someone besides themselves. Suckers. That’s what I told myself.

You can’t control everything. Just enjoy what the world is giving you.

“This makes me believe in God way more than that big Christo,” my tiny Catholic cousin proclaimed. We lifted our caipiriñhas to the Big Man Upstairs.

I came up with a new and improved system of bases after a conversation with a gay friend, who had told me that the gay base system is dramatically different from the straight. In his world, first base was a blow job, second was anal, third involved a third, and a home run was pretty complicated but probably involved a swing and a go-go dancer.

(Lesbian bases, I’ve been told, involve a lot of baths and toys at first and second bases, and buying a house and building a compost garden together as you round third. A home run is when you’ve stopped having sex altogether and start a book club.)

that life is almost never about choosing between one thing you really want and another thing you don’t want at all. If you’re lucky, and healthy, and live in a country where you have enough to eat and no fear that you’re going to get shot when you walk out your door, life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally. And you have to evaluate and determine which awesome thing you want infinitesimally more, and then give up that other awesome thing you want almost exactly as much. You have to trade awesome for awesome. Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mourning for that other thing.

I always say that I need to travel to keep from dying of boredom from my own internal monologue. I think that, generally, most of us have a total of about twenty thoughts. And we just scroll through those thoughts, over and over again, in varying order, all day every day.

“In Judaism, the way you learn to love someone is by giving to them,” she said. “The more you give to a person, the more you end up loving them. If love is just a feeling, and that feeling changes, then what? Love has to be something you choose to build.”

Israelis are some of the best in the world at living in the moment, and shrugging off possible disaster. Statistically they are also some of the happiest, which I believe is directly connected.