What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

First, that I’m someone a little different on the road, and that vacation from being my home self feels like a great sleep after a long day.

A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a house full of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but now it’s a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures.

She was not constitutionally capable of noticing what anyone around her wanted or needed.

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.”

There is an actual medical condition called Jerusalem Syndrome. Each year, it afflicts hundreds of people when they go to Israel and are so religiously moved that they become convinced God is speaking to them, and that they are the Messiah. There is a dedicated wing in the psychiatric ward at a hospital in Jerusalem that deals with these people. I met a psychiatrist who works there, and asked her what the treatment is. “It is easiest if there is more than one patient in the clinic at a time,” she told me. “The best way to snap them out of it is usually to introduce them to each other.” I love that image—the guy who is sure he’s the Messiah meeting another guy who is sure he’s the Messiah, and immediately going, “Oh. Well, that guy sounds crazy. Never mind.”