What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul.

I did ask Sasha’s mother how to say “Have a nice day” in Russian, but she just frowned and said, “We don’t really say that.”

I read Eat Pray Love, which caused me intense stress due to how much I both hated the narrator for her self-involved, self-inflicted misery in the middle of a pretty amazing life, and deeply related to her, due to my tendency to be self-involved and inflict misery on myself in the middle of my pretty amazing life.

(The Dutch taught us the word swaffle, which means “to hit something with your flaccid penis.” This is apparently something the Dutch do often enough that they needed a word for it.)

My friends who met their spouses young have often told me they live vicariously through my adventures. That they sometimes think about the oats they never got a chance to sow. There is a trade-off for both their choice and mine. I used to beat my head over Vito, when he was struggling for years over how he wanted to be with me, but also wanted a life that wasn’t compatible with my life. He couldn’t believe that he couldn’t have everything, and so just wouldn’t choose. And I would tell him, so full of twentysomething wisdom,

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 ...

Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mournin...

“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.

My therapist says, “All tenderness comes from your first pain.”