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I'm going on my first "adult" vacation Monday, the first vacation that I brainstormed, planned and paid for without any parental input.

My friend and I are going to Disney World.

There will be dispatches from Main Street USA if time and adventures warrant.

(For a real travelogue, just go here and follow N's adventures in India.)

sad.

The good news is that my dear friend who just went to India was in and out of the Mumbai train station a whole eight hours before people started killing other people there. The bad news is the tail end of the sentence.

Also, I know the family of someone who was reporting on the terrorism in Mumbai - they just moved there last summer. I sent the 11-year-old daughter an e-mail to make sure everyone was OK.

Her response:

"ya we r fine but there r these terrorists r attacking this building near me"

OMFG.

nosto book keeper

"Grease is my favorite vegetable."

baltic

I went with a couple friends to a book reading in Baltic, CT, which is somewhere beyond Norwich, with a town center that consisted of churches, a convenience store and an unlabeled diner sandwiched between miles of ready-made two-family houses.

The reading, by a psychologist-science writer, Gary Greenberg, was in the diner - his daily breakfast joint - with a warm-up reading by his fellow local author breakfast companion, Glenn Cheney. (Glenn wrote the sole Amazon comment on Gary's book so far, giving it five stars: "This is a good book for anyone who needs something new to think about. For others, well, there's always hallucinogens and TV.")

Here is Gary's invitation e-mail:

Most of you know by now--because I've told you, maybe more than once—that my book, The Noble Lie, came out this fall. It's a series of stories about what happens when doctors turn moral dilemmas into medical problems and then try to diagnose away our confusion. Which—not to ruin the end or anything—is usually not pretty, but is often funny.

I thought about having a big celebrity- studded book party, but I couldn't round up a shirt that takes studs. So I settled for a couple of fellow writers who don't even own cummerbunds. We're going to have a Book Event at Fred's News in Baltic, CT, the town the Parker Bros. had in mind when they made Baltic Ave the second-cheapest property in Monopoly.

The evening will be cleverly timed to coincide with the beginning of the holiday shopping season--Friday, Nov. 21st. The doors (actually, there's only one) will open at 630, and by the time it's all over, it will be 830 or 9. There will be food and drink. There will be music. There will be reading. There will be autographing. There will not be oil, but there will be books. The event is a benefit. If you buy any books—and I certainly hope you will—profits will be donated to the Covenant Soup Kitchen in Willimantic.

The other writers are Penny Newbury and Glenn Cheney. Penny is the author of the recently released short story collection Remember Me. Most of her stories take place near New London and Groton, where she grew up, or the countries she lived in before she came to work in, of all places, Baltic. She'd never heard of it before either.

Glenn has just published his twentieth book, Thanksgiving: The Pilgrims' First Year in America. It covers just about every known fact about what happened between the landing of the Mayflower and the famous harvest feast celebrated the following fall (and that will be celebrated again, speaking of clever coincidences, on the Thursday following the reading). It's easily the funniest book ever written on the subject of people who flee persecution, brave a horrific ocean crossing on a tiny, germ-infested boat, and then find themselves in a hostile wilderness with absolutely no idea of what they are doing.

Excerpts from both Glenn's and Penny's books are available at NLLibrarium.com. You can read excerpts from The Noble Lie at http://tinyurl.com/6eclvp, which is an abbreviated address for the amazon page.

Fred's News, which, by the way, no longer sells newspapers and has never been owned by anyone named Fred, is at 51 W. Main Street (Rt. 207) in Baltic. There's no Fred's News sign, but there are a couple of outside lights and an awning, which, even though it's nighttime, I'll ask them to unfurl for your convenience. Fred's is on the north side of the road a few hundred yards from the intersection with Rt. 97, and directly opposite a building that if it were twenty stories taller, a lot prettier, and filled with well-dressed young publishing executives, would be a dead ringer for the Flatiron in New York. There's not a surplus of parking along the street, but there is a Methodist church and a phone company office on the other side of W. Main Street, each of which has a parking lot behind it; a big Catholic church a couple hundred yards farther west on Rt. 207 that has a large lot; and, to the east of Fred's, just around the corner on Rt. 97, a stone building called the Grist Mill, which houses the Sprague public library, and which has, you guessed it, a large parking lot. So, by the way, does the Baltic Convenience/Package Store, conveniently located right on the 97/207 corner. Not that I'm telling you to park in any of those places, but I can assure you that the streets of Baltic are safe and that the tow truck drivers probably don't know where it is either.

If you let me know if you're coming, then we can make sure to have enough food and drink. Any questions, email me.

Gary

He does not mention that Fred's News is the localest of local joints, with a large open griddle, cluttered sports and vintage advertisement paraphernalia and, as my friend noted, Tiffany-style lamps whose porcelain shades depicted Nascar drivers (they turned on by touching the lamp base). Also that Glenn's book is a day-by-day rundown of life in Plymouth that's unintentionally hilarious. It's full of tidbits like, "The captain died, and then the rest of us observed the Sabbath day of rest; they were sick and running out of beer." On and on and on.

When Glenn finally stopped recounting minutiae of the first winter in the New World, Gary stepped back to the microphone and quipped, "If they were Jewish, that would be the Haggadah."

i'm drinking coffee from my zabar's mug this morning, for sure

MSNBC guy stands outside Zabar's in a McCain-Palin t-shirt and then is surprised that people are so liberal.

Let Upper West Side Jews steal your affection here.

coworkers

My corner-mates were talking about the importance of embarrassing their offspring. I questioned the wisdom, since I'm the approximate age of their kids.

K: "I feel it's my job as the younger demographic to question your logic."

Beloved, adorable colleague: "Your premise is flawed, because there is no logic there."

madison square art

Must go see this (Oct. 24 - Nov. 17). Madison Square Park is one of the greatest places on the planet.

sukkot

"You'll never believe what happened to me this afternoon," I said to my editor after returning from a meeting with the head of the local Jewish Federation over two hours after leaving to meet him.

"He happened to you," she said with a small smile, using his name.

I was walking to the Federation, I told her, when he shouted out his window, "Are you coming to see me? Get in." I did, and he announced we would go to the Sukkah of the local Hasidic rabbi and speak there.

"You have to warn me when people are insane," I chided my editor.

Her reply?

"You didn't tell me you'd be getting in the car with him!"

But I did, and soon we were a couple miles beyond downtown New London. There were about 20 people of all ages and observance levels sitting around two giant tables crammed into the Sukkah, and a meal was about to begin, less than a half-hour after I finished my lunch.

They ushered the Fed prez and me inside to wash. I've never done it, so I did not know the blessings. The rabbi's pale, slight wife talked me through the ritual as their eight children stomped in and out of the kitchen (they range from age three to 14, and seven of them are girls). I felt like I'd stepped out of the car and into Washington Heights or Williamsburg; the whole family was dressed to Orthodox modesty standards, and the wife wore a wig. They're the first Orthodox Jews I've seen since moving here in April. They are the only Hasidic family in the city.

The tables in the Sukkah were covered with a meat feast - steak, meatballs, pasta with chicken, stuffed peppers, sweet potato pie, challah... I sat erect, half-off my chair as I do when I'm uncertain as to what I should be doing. Fed prez began loading my plate with meat hunks. I told him I wasn't very hungry, and he said that I should just eat half of it for appearances' sake.

"It's my second lunch today too," he said, grinning and patting his Santa belly.

Commence festive meal, interspersed with the black-hatted, bearded Rabbi breaking into jolly song snippets and taunting the two (secular) Israeli teens visiting for the year when they didn't know the words.

(Side note: does anyone know how all those Hasidic men snag wives? Does anyone find those wispy beards attractive? Seriously?)

When the wife went in to prepare dessert, I followed to ask her advice on how to feed my Orthodox friends in this area without a Kosher kitchen should they come to visit. We ended up having a long, fun talk, but it gave me the sense that she's lonely. Her two eldest daughters live with grandparents to attend school in Brooklyn, and she home schools the rest with online resources. I asked who she socializes with, and she waffled a bit before saying that she talks to her sister on the phone a lot. I hear that; a good chunk of my social life is phone and gchat-based. But I'm not the sole Hasidic woman in an entire region. After, per her husband's wishes, she talked me through shaking the lulav, she asked if I was interested in studying Torah with her an hour a week.

I told her I didn't know, because I didn't have the heart to outright refuse.

adventures in "i work saturdays"

A bored detective working the dispatch desk and I had a wide-ranging conversation when I went to collect police logs this afternoon. He asked me my name so that he could look up my articles and heckle me in the reader comments, and I found myself explaining why, when people ask my name, I tend to just give my first name unless people specify. (It has to do with my last name sounding very Jewish, and I'm not religious, so I don't like being labeled by my name. That said, I dislike the fact that I'm not fond of my name, so I refuse to change my byline. It's cyclical K-think.)

"You're crazy, aren't you?" was his response. "Should you really be out there driving around?"

This from a man who who described one arrestee's name as "funny," accused me of spitting on the apple he was eating a couple yards away, called the lobby phone from behind the desk while I was writing and asked me to answer it and called a colleague in another town a garden gnome.

Made my day.

"this is how it works..."

I am often deliberate in deciding what sort of gal I wish to be. In college, I decided that I was going improve my posture, my (mental) health, my journalism skills and my ability to exude confidence. I did all those things. A couple old men outside a barber shop near my apartment have complimented me on my posture multiple times, and everybody else just assumes I'm a dancer. (That shows how well people know me here. Friends can relate that I've never been able to dance, ever, though the idea of ballet lessons intrigues me.)

Right now, I'm working on turning my tendency to say "hey" into "hi" or "hello" and "yeah" into "yes," simply because I think those changes would make me sound more polished.

Verbal habits aside, I'm flying blind.

A lot of the affect, etc., I chose to acquire during college are often read as pretentious or condescending in New London. That upsets me, because I don't judge others for doing things I happen to consider unappealing as far as doing them myself. The person I chose to become does not fit in here. Instead of changing myself as I did in New York, I'm pretty happy with myself, which means I now spend a lot of time feeling alone and misinterpreted.

I also cannot decide how to approach bringing change into my life. Do I want to blossom at my current job, fall deeper into a yoga practice, and build a cute little life here for a few years? Do I want to be in NYC at any costs? NYC if I can get a job a want, or one with a trajectory? Someplace warmer, but only for a journalism job? Grad school? Somewhere far, far away from this country, which is in free fall anyhow? Do I want a balanced life or conventional success? Where and how can I do the best writing? How will I know when I'm doing it?

I do know that whether I make an interior paradigm shift or an external one, something needs to change. I feel trapped too often and have too many weeks where I'm sunk helplessly in depression; walking through a doom fog is an energy drain, even if "doom" is a fun word.