What caught my attention, however, was an endnote for Chapter 5,"The Economics of Apocalpse." It applies to how we analyze our current political leadership It reads,

As individuals, Hitler and Stalin embodied different forms of the early nineteenth-century German response to the Enlightenment: Hitler the tragic romantic hero who must bear the burden of leading a flawed nation, Stalin the Hegelian world spirit that reveals reason in history and dictates it to others."

So, dear readers, what about President Obama as an archetype of leadership: tragic romantic hero or Hegelian world spirit? I think he aspires for the latter and will be seen as a failure as the former.

After responding emotionally to this event, the most reasonable step - when searching for a cause or explanation - is to discuss mental health in the United States. All the anecdotes and evidence available indicate that the murderer was mentally unstable. (I'm afraid that without a formal diagnosis, "mentally unstable" is the only terminology appropriate, though it is a rather broad assessment.) In all likelihood, he was not being treated. The fellow was living in his parents' house, and one can point to them for not being aware of his condition. Nevertheless, he was a 22 year-old man, not a boy. The parents, however, live in a world where mental health - and mental health treatment - are still too taboo.

At some level, this response is a clear evasion of the matter at hand, and its avoidance is second in tragedy only to the very event at hand. Matt Bai reports that Sarah Palin had a cross-hairs target over then-candidate Giffords' district and that following the assassination attempt, she promptly removed it and offered a statement, which David Frum has described as defensive and not compassionate. It may have been the most significant mistake Palin has made in the public eye since she campaigned for vice-president in 2008.

Nevertheless, friends have pointed out to me that the Democrats employed bulls-eye targets on states in the 2004 election where they wanted to oust a Republican who they viewed as particularly offensive. I do think there is a פילפול discussion to get involved in here wherein one contrasts a bulls-eye with a cross-hairs, but I won't enter into it here.

To conclude, I am completely committed to condemning the employment of weapons-related rhetoric in public discourse. In this respect, the politician who has spoken most successfully on my behalf and upon the behalf of countless other peace-loving citizens of the United States is Democratic Representative from New York Carolyn McCarthy. “I put a lot of blame on…the rhetoric...You had some pretty high up political people saying, ‘Get your guns out –we’re going to take our country back’ —you have to be careful," she said.

This pattern led me to think on how my use of Internet media has shifted over the past decade. First came anonymous postings to sites, followed by essays on Texas to a site called the Back Word, which operated on a magazine model with articles selected and posted monthly. That led to my earliest personal essays that helped me build my confidence as an essayist with something to say.

Then the Back Word stopped publishing and even vanished from the Net -- it didn't even remain as a ghost site.

Kesher Talk absorbed my Web energies for years, but then I started looking for outlets for my interest in essays, and I found that elsewhere. As the number of KT contributors shrank, I felt my enthusiasm lessen, although I've always posted at least one item per month. Earlier this year I resolved to post an item a day, and that resolve lasted for about two glorious, creative weeks, until I got too busy with the day job.

In between, I found other places to post essays, some with my name, some without. If I have something to say, I'll say it.

And now Facebook rises to the surface as a place for short dispatches -- Twitter without Twittering -- with feedback aplenty. Until recently, I didn't see it as the next wave of communications, but I'm changing my view. I still do journalism that appears online, my articles for the Princeton Alumni Weekly, for example, and quick thoughts for dear old Kesher Talk, for which I have enormous affection, but my focus is shifting again.

Where will it be in 2011? I'm trying to come up with big-impact essay ideas, which have tailed off lately. I still have the dream of cracking the New York Times' "Modern Love" Sunday essay section, where I've submitted two essays in the past, two no avail. I have an idea for something new to try. The new year will tell. Even if the TImes doesn't bite, I'll get it posted somewhere in this age of self-publishing. FBers are sure to know.

Maybe.

The current controversy was started by Thilo Sarrazin, a politician in the Social Democratic (center-left) party and high level official in the German equivalent of the Federal Reserve. Recently, he wrote a book, Germany Abolishes Itself. arguing that Muslims in Germany have become a burden on the general populace and despairing of integrating them into the body politic. The problem with integration, according to Sarrazin, is in some part genetic and some part cultural. The book struck a chord with a large part of the German population, reopening the debate on the place of the Muslim minority in Germany.

Sarrazin himself encapsulates the problem that Germany has with this issue.

I spent alot of time in Germany in the 80s as an employee of the German based multinational Siemens. And, as a Jew, I was particularly interested in understanding their attitude towards minorities.

What struck me most is that Germans don't really have a way to discuss ethnic issues. They live in a historically homogenous society with a horrific history of racism. They have a huge amount of shame over what their parents and grandparents did, but on the other hand, they have absolutely no experience with living in a multi ethnic society. My own experience is that many German's are deaf to the subtleties between criticizing members of a group and stereotyping. In America, we do not realize how careful and skilled we are in defining the boundaries between racism and legitimate criticism. We still argue about it, (and many people don't get it), but there are rules and principles we mostly agree on. Germans seem to swing between crude ethnic stereotypes or political correct culturally relative multiculturalism.

You cannot compare what is going on now with German anti-semitism of the Nazi era or before. The Jews of that time were not a social problem. They were thoroughly assimilated and were in no way a burden or threat to German society. By any measure, the Moslem population of Germany today presents some real social problems. Chief among these are:

* high levels of unemployment
* welfare dependency
* language
* education
* militancy and terrorism.

That being said, Sarrizin's talk about lower intelligence among Moslems in Germany struck me as racist. I know you can interpret it different ways (especially since I haven’t read the book), but this argument has long been a refuge for bigots. And if the problem is genes there is nothing you can do about it. You can persuade someone to stay in school, study and graduate. You cannot persuade them to change their genetic makeup. I would also bet euros to strudel that any difference in average IQ cannot explain why people become terrorists or enter into forced marriages.

His talk about Jews sharing a common gene did not bother me as much, although the language used is very crude. Claiming all Jews share a common gene is a gross oversimplification of reality. However, it is established that there are DNA sequences frequently found among Jews. The most unfortunate evidence of this is the existence of tay-sachs. A more benign example is the evidence of a Kohen DNA signature among Jews of priestly heritage. Either way, the fact that Jews share a common anscestry that reveals itself in DNA should not surprise anyone.

But it bothered lots of Germans. Somehow, talking about Jews as a race is considered racist in itself. This is another way Germans just don't get it. Jews certainly share a common ancestry. The problem with Nazis was not that they thought Jews were a separate race, but that they thought they were an inferior race that had to be destroyed.

Sarrizins' writing seems to me to come from someone addressing a real, serious problem without having the skills to distinguish between criticizing other groups and denigrating them in crude terms. And he is obviously speaking for alot of Germans.

Germans are going to have to collectively refine their social skills to deal with their current problem.

The ad's ending voice-over extols the American knack for cars and freedom, after Challengers rout a British redcoat contingent during the Revolutionary War. The mournful music sounds like a riff on "Ashoken Farewell" as featured in Ken Burns's monumental series "The Civil War."

None of this sells me on any benefit of the car, and it makes me look askance at the overall message, since the British have been American allies for the last century, at least. I like a good flag-waving image as much as anybody, but this gratuitous slap at an ally, with some extremely forced and fake patriotic message, drives me away from the product. The lead car is driven by an actor dressed like George Washington, in a style that reminds me more of wretched President's Birthday sales-athon ads than something airing on national TV.

Finally, for a patriotism-drenched ad, Dodge ends it with a curious color combination. Instead of red, white and blue, the final shot shows red and black, which must be colors associated with Dodge but to me they look like some kind of raging anarchist banner, or something from Franco's Spain. The image adds the final strangeness to an ad that, if nothing else, stands out in a world of fairly bland automotive advertising.

For great car advertising, nothing beats Kia's Super Bowl ad for the Sorento, which introduced me to the song :"How Do You Like Me Now" by the Heavy. This is an ad I can watch over and over for the brilliant melding of music, imagery, cultural overtones from a half-century of movies set in Las Vegas and even the message: Expect the Unexpected.

The hardest person to shop for? Hands down, that is -- myself.

Except for the most random impulse buys (Pandora music service, the fall issue of the great City Journal) and groceries, I always struggle to buy myself anything. I do massive research, collect opinions, canvass friends on their suggestions and worry about whether I'm getting ripped off. Call it neurotic; I call it a sure-fire strategy for almost never buying anything.

I borrowed a saw and got to work. After much wheezing amidst twanging, stop-and start saw action, I had made a dent in the wood, but I couldn't see how I could ever finish with a dull blade and a big boxspring. So, ever resourceful, I moved to Plan B: I borrowed a hefty electric saw from a friend. He was dubious, to say the least, but let me have it.

The mighty Melita saw sat in my apartment for a while, quietly daring me to use it. Go ahead, big boy, it silently sneered at me. Plug me in. Turn me on. Cut some fingers off.

I read the instruction manual and realized that my entire approach to using the this saw -- I can't even begin to list the safety violations I would have committed - was insane. I had never used one. I had nobody to help me. I didn't have a secure place to put the boxspring. Sadly, I filed away my fantasies of being Mr. Goodsaw. I turned to the only tool I can handle with confidence -- a credit card.

My problem, in part, was the horrible reputation of the national bedding chains. I decided if I needed to get a boxspring, my best bet would be to find a local provider who would likely appreciate my business. I would become, therefore, a bedding locavore. And I found exactly that, in the form of Norwalk Mattress Company. I measured my bed, hauled myself to Norwalk, described my needs, found what I want, placed the order and left. A few days later I got the boxspring and metal frame and bid the hard, semi-sawed wooden boxspring (which was more of a platform, with no springs) a fond farewell. I was left with a comfortable bed and, most important, all 10 fingers.

Now I'm moving into the next consumer quandary, a new camera. Almost two years ago I wanted to replace a Canon digital hobbled by a broken zoom lens button. I went through my whole dramatic search cycle and finally settled on a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28. It works well enough, but its bulk makes it impractical for use on the streets of New York, where I always like to have a camera in hand for when I stumble onto a political demonstration, an engaging image of buildings in silhouette, or some wackiness in front of News Corp. building, home of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. I always feel too obvious with the Lumix, and want something more pocketable.

I've been brooding over this decision for months now. I check the selection at Costco, where I got the Lumix. I avidly scan the reviews and suggestions on CNET and Consumer Reports, then I look at dense technical reports on the digital photography reviews. The comments pro and con on Amazon make my head spin as my eye constantly gravitates to the negative comments, and I imagine how I'll suffer from every obscure menu and misplaced control button. I have zeroed in on Canon and Panasonic models -- until a friend with an exceptionally advanced knowledge of cameras started singing the praises of the Olympus E-PL1, which is now enticing me with ads on Facebook. I'll try to find it in a store to see whether it's small enough, and a get a sense of its controls. In the mean time, a personal recommendation carries a huge amount of weight with me.

Part of the fun is the waiting -- for lower prices, for more options, for the blinding insight or experience that points me toward THE right choice. I read someplace that new cameras roll out in February, so that should lower the prices on existing models. But I may decide to make a decision before then and actually get something (knowing me, perhaps something not even on my radar screen at the moment).

Now, when it comes to clothes shopping . . . let's save that discussion for another day.

Seeing Frank Rich's opinion piece in the Sunday NYT reminded me of the 2000 presidential election, during which the left declared that there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. That view was based in the argument that both parties answer primarily to corporate money, and it became the foundation of Ralph Nader's presidential campaign. After the election, some liberals were distraught that "Bush stole the election." Others, however, were angry at the left for supporting Nader, an act which led to a loss of votes for Al Gore.

Seeing Frank Rich's opinion piece in the Sunday NYT reminded me of the 2000 presidential election, during which the left declared that there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. That view was based in the argument that both parties answer primarily to corporate money, and it became the foundation of Ralph Nader's presidential campaign. After the election, some liberals were distraught that "Bush stole the election." Others, however, were angry at the left for supporting Nader, an act which led to a loss of votes for Al Gore.

Here again, today, we see a similar argument. Much of the political discourse in the mainstream media over the last month and a half - in anticipation of the midterm elections and then in the aftermath - lamented that the left is less inclined to support their man in the White House - O - than the right was when their man - W - was there. Rich's piece is an excellent example of just this.

He writes, "The story of recent corporate political donations — which we may never learn in its entirety — is just beginning to be told. Bloomberg News reported after Election Day that the United States Chamber of Commerce’s anti-Democratic war chest included a mind-boggling $86 million contribution from the insurance lobby to fight the health care bill...In a reportorial coup before Election Day, the investigative news organization ProPublica wrote of the similarly behind-closed-doors activities of the New Democrat Coalition — 'a group of 69 lawmakers whose close relationship with several hundred Washington lobbyists' makes them 'one of the most successful political money machines” since DeLay’s K Street Project collapsed in 2007. During the Congressional battle over financial-services reform last May, coalition members repaired to a retreat on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to frolic with lobbyists dedicated to weakening the legislation."

On the one hand, one could commend Rich for not just being a party man: He gives it to the Republicans, and he gives it to the Democrats. But somehow, I get the sense not that he is independent and non-partisan but that he is above-it-all. I wonder why he and other liberal pundits haven't learned the danger of suggesting that Democrats and Republicans are both in the hands of corporate interests. All this argument does is alienate left-liberals from the Democratic party, weakening the party's overall chances of winning elections. The only benefit I can see is that it feeds one's sense of self-righteousness.

As if to ensure that left-liberals feel alienated from O, Rich reports, "Since the election, the Obama White House has sent signals that it will make nice to these [corporate] interests. While the president returns to photo ops at factories, Timothy Geithner has already met with the chamber’s board out of camera range."

I am sympathetic toward Rich's indignation regarding Wall Street. He writes, "Last week, as the Fed’s new growth projections downsized hope for significant decline in the unemployment rate, the Commerce Department reported that corporate profits hit a record high. Those profits aren’t trickling down into new jobs or into higher salaries for those not in the executive suites...Wall Street is already celebrating the approach of bonus season by partying like it’s 2007."

Furthermore, he quotes John Cassidy of The New Yorker: “During a period in which American companies have created iPhones, Home Depot and Lipitor, [the industry reaping the highest profits and compensation is one that] doesn’t design, build or sell a tangible thing.” This statement sounds a great deal like the philosophies of my father and grandfather and therefore strikes a chord with me.

To conclude, I would like to suggest a possible reason that I haven't heard discussed much elsewhere for why Wall Street is so dominant in our economy and society and why it is so unabashedly unchastined. This reason is offered tentatively, so I am eager to hear feedback. When I was an undergraduate at an ivy league school, it seemed that everybody was lining up to go into investment banking and consulting. Meanwhile, the campus was filled with a lack of serious academic scholarship or discourse, a development that I connect to both the dominance of political correctness and the hegemony of left-liberals in the faculty. I would suggest that most students are turned off by this culture. Still, they are not interested in challenging it since doing so risks social ostracism. As a result, they turn their attention to indulgence - partying and money-making. Notions of civic responsibility and the enterprise of serious thought hold virtually no one's active esteem. As a result of this culture, students pile upon each other for lucrative jobs on Wall Street, which are low on social responsibility and high on self-indulgence. This, to me, is one of the sources of the phenomenon that Rich discusses and is repulsed by, but I think he is pursuing the wrong tact. The outcome is that liberalism in America suffers.

I've had Jamaican food before so I was eager to try the new kids on the block. I'm glad I did. The place has a cozy, neighborhood feel with posters of Bob Marley all around -- the photo below shows Ms. Gibson next to one of the large pieces. I got the oxtail and liked it, along a ginger soda and finally bread pudding for dessert. The check was very reasonable and the Monty Alexander jazz CD of Marley's music set the right tone without being thumpingly intrusive.

Ms. Gibson, assisted on the night I visited by her daughter, shows a real love for the cuisine and culture of Jamaica, and provides a personal touch that puts a Taste of Jamaica high on my list of Westchester dining. Next time, I'll try the jerk chicken. Now if she could only open a branch in Westport . . .

I saw an advertisement, however, on TV Saturday night, October 2 for a feature titled, "Holy War: Should Americans Fear Islam?," which would appear on "This Week." When I turned it on Sunday morning, I saw a number of participants and audience members whom I never expected to see, such as Robert Spencer, creator of Jihad Watch, and Gary Bauer, a leading Evangelical who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. These are hard personalities to relate to, though Bauer proved to be rather articulate. I wasn't sure whether they had been invited to create balance or to give the impression that only marginal, loud-mouthed individuals are concerned with radical Islam in America.

In addition, my heroine, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, appeared by satellite. Her presence was the highlight of the hour-long show and earned Amanpour and her producers credibility since I believe her to be the most important voice out there on Islamism and its relationship to Islam.

Among those who were there to cast anyone who considers Islamism a danger in America as an Islamaphobe were Reza Aslan, by satellite, and Daisy Kahn, the co-founder of Park51.

Despite its cerebral content, "Holy War" quickly took on a Jerry Springer-like quality. The large number of participants and the many degrees of separation between their various perspectives made a sensible conversation rather impossible. In a certain respect, I was glad to see "This Week's" producers produce a show on such a sensitive topic that was so ridiculously free-wheeling and borderline out-of-control. One would think that with such a title, producers would be inclined to tread trepidatiously, but they let the participants go to town.

A most disturbing exchange took place between Daisy Khan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which concretized my image of Daisy as an intellectually bereft, insensitive, and power-hungry figure.

Daisy: First of all, I think that if we have to create a counter against extremism, it's Muslims who have to lead that...This is what we Muslims want to do, but you have tied our hands. You don't allow us to do this because you brand somebody like me as an extremist, and throw me into the arms of al-Qaeda.

HIRSI: You have freedom to move anywhere, no one is throwing you anywhere. Your rights are protected. I think that it's your perception of being a victim, and I think that's --

DAISY: I am not a victim, Ayaan. Stop calling me that. You're the one running with all the bodyguards.

The sheer rudeness of this remark astounded me. It took what is a real concern - Ali's safety - and unabashedly diminished it. Ali was aiming for a good point - she basically made it but needed a drop more time for elaboration; however, Daisy's interjection derailed it. Her comment was saturated with immaturity and reminded me of the kind of quick jab - devoid of substance but full of mockery - high school students regularly deliver upon one another.

Fidel Castro should move quickly and capitalize (to turn a phrase) on the moves and show Cubans how a good capitalist acts. The now-retired Castro could make a great living by writing a book, hitting the talk-show circuit and cashing in on his bloody, revolutionary fame. The slavish attention paid to his every move by the mainstream media shows he should cash in now on his image and phrase-making to supplement his no-doubt modest state pension in Cuba.

The timing would be perfect to coincide with the baseball playoffs. Fidel could throw out the first ball of the World Series, showing off his formidable baseball skills. I’m pretty sure he could zing one over the plate and, who knows, that could be the start of starting or moving a franchise to Havana, a perfect place for a team in a baseball-obsessed nation.

During the winter months, Castro could don his olive fatigues and start working the fundraiser circuit around the Upper West Side, Hollywood and other liberal haunts where his bloody history counts as no negative. For, say, $50,000, he could mix and mingle at your party and guarantee a crush of attendees eager to meet a real revolutionary. And the stories he could tell about his friends and adventures – Che, Granma, Nikita, Bay of Pigs, executions, expropriations, Meyer Lansky, Angola, the Mariel Boatlift (take that, Uncle Sam!).

The exciting turn to capitalism, however grudgingly, could also make Fidel a hit on the business-conference circuit. Forget the unwashed masses – the business class could find Fidel a surprising ally in its efforts to fight regulation and government growth. If he could learn to keep his presentations down to under three hours and brush up on his PowerPoint skills, Fidel would find audience eager to hear about his inspirational tales of new love for privatization and public-sector layoffs (no White House sleepovers with that message!). Think of him as a bolshevik Jack Welch or Tony Robbins.

Finally, let’s talk branding and merchandising. From the military gear to the cigars to the beard, Fidel projects a carefully tended, world-class identity. The name alone puts him in the same one-name league as Madonna, Clint, Brangelina, Barack. He’s always been hot image-wise, and now he’s really grabbed the world stage. Finally, he has a chance to get the merchandising sizzle that Che Guevara always held with images, books and photography (too bad about Che’s little run-in with the CIA in Bolivia in 1967; as the song goes, que sera sera).

Castro could hire the best of the best to package his fashionista sense in a line called “Siempre Fidel,” complete with clothes, revolutionary artwork and cigars. Heck, why not a video game about the Cuban Revolution? Action games are always popular, and nobody tops Fidel as a first-person shooter.

Once school had ended last spring, but before my summer as a reporter on Long Island began, I immediately immersed myself in the cathode hot tub of American culture. On any evening in early June I hunkered down in front of Colonial Club’s TV, deliciously slack-jawed while advertisements played the summer hard sell, showering this winter shut-in with scenes of beach frolic, the open road and heavy, heavy socializing. [Colonial Club was the eating club to which I belonged at Princeton.]

The message fit nicely with the brochures sent to the Newsday interns. TV said WHAT to do, while the booklets and maps told me WHERE to do it. (With WHOM was the problem.) Equipped with my first car, the Newsday social calendar and, of course, lots of gasoline, I was bound and determined to enjoy myself, even if I nearly killed myself in the process.

As things transpired, Murphy’s Law – if something can go wrong, it will – became the organizing principle of my adventures, as the bubble of expectations shrank rapidly after continual prickings. Like a surfer who paddles farther and farther out to sea in search of the perfect wave, I wasted a lot of time looking for something that wasn’t there, while missing the lesser but more accessible possibilities for diversion. Once I shed the Mr. Goodbar mentality, things improved. There’s nothing wrong with watching the Yankees with neighbors.

So there were some lessons to be learned, or relearned in some cases, over the summer. Mainly, I realized that in life, unlike sports, you don’t have to score to win. To make a deliberate search for the love of your life – whether at singles’ bars or their collegiate equivalent, club parties – is an exercise in futility. Friends are made, not captured.

Freshmen should keep that in mind as they pass through the swirl of introductions and forgotten names this week. More than high grades or a superficial social visibility, the friends you make and the experiences you share will give Princeton a meaning and fullness that will remain with you long after academic matters have slipped into the past. [Incredibly enough, this pathetic attempt to rationalize socio-sexual failure turned out to be true.]

Different adventures yielded different lessons. For freshmen and others who prefer to experience such things vicariously, the following vignettes should suffice.

1. You’re your own best transportation. You invite disaster when you must rely upon the good will of other people to meet your transportation needs. Nobody ever wants to leave when you do. Once, to get to a church singles dance, I left my car at the Hicksville train station and patriotically rode the fabled Long Island Rail Road to Carle Place and saved a few precious ounces of gas. Nobody at the dance knew when I could get a train back to Hicksville. A young woman had offered to drive me back, so I didn’t worry. My easy state of mind lasted about as long as the dance did. Gee-whiz, the wood-be driver said, as she primly wrung her hands, she couldn’t give me a ride after all, because I was a strange man and her parents wouldn’t want her to give potential weirdos rides at one in the morning. She was adamant, and even an offer to let her examine my press card was to no avail. Finally, after considerable waiting and cursing on a chilly train platform, a member of the clean-up crew took me to my car.

2. Quality does not assure compatibility. This is just a rephrasing of the King Midas Dilemma. Why else would I have gotten intensely bored as the only male in a singles group’s post-movie trip to that noted eatery, the Syosset Restaurant? The women – two fairly young, two others better described as “matronly” – were nice enough, but the conversation moved into areas we never explored in Philosophy 200, or even during Freshman Week’s beery confessions. Husbands, ex-husbands, baby-sitters, startling propositions and the ultimate truths contained in the movie Manhattan made me very, very sleepy.; My rather obvious foot-tapping was both a signal for somebody to take me to the parking lot where the group had gathered, and a means of combating waves of grogginess.

3. When opportunity knocks, don’t close the door. If you do, try not to catch your fingers in it. This became apparent one Saturday evening at the Lone Star Café, a Fifth Avenue hangout for visiting oilmen, Gucci cowboys and people who crave Pearl Beer and guacamole dip. While waiting at the bar for two other journalists, a young woman, a teacher, began talking to me. Like a light in the control booth at Three Mile Island the word “contact!” began flashing in my mind. We chatted, but when one of the friends I was expecting arrived, I turned my attention to her and felt no allegiance to the teacher whose acquaintance I had just made. After a while the teacher left. This didn’t really bother me, because two others had replaced her, and social Nirvana, I was sure, was dawning. As it was, I saw neither of these two again, a state of affairs that made me ruefully appreciate the teacher even as memories of the brief encounter faded. [I can still picture the woman sitting with me at the bar. I think her name was Carol and she might have been a lexicographer. Not for the last time did I miss an opportunity. Where is she now?]

4. Look for a catharsis. The most effective way of dealing with the feelings of frustration and listlessness that strike everybody at one time or another is to lay them on the table, confront them and then move ahead. Talking with my landlady always helped me. [My landlady in Old Bethpage was a Newsday librarian and I have very fond memories of our summer. As I was leaving for a post-internship trip home to Texas, I surprised her with a going away gift, the just-published Sophie’s Choice.] Once you realize that the great cosmic forces are not thumbing their noses in your direction, the malaise becomes less intense. One Saturday, in a particularly superfluous mood, I walked past a movie line near Greenwich Village. The crowd had just started moving in, and the marquee bore the names of films by Ingmar Bergman, whose work I had never seen.

There followed an evening of Liv Ullmann and rollicking Scandinavian angst. It was just what the doctor ordered. After three hours of Autumn Sonata and Cries and Whispers, I felt great and practically bounced up to Penn Station.

Cynthia and Philip Auerbach have lived in Fair Haven for 44 years, rearing a family of three and now regularly hosting nine grandchildren at their 3,400-square-foot home, which they recently put on the market in an effort to downsize. When they first moved here, Ms. Auerbach said, they were looking for a community that "offered some diversity."

"It was important to my husband and me that we not be in an all-white, all-upper-class atmosphere," said Mrs. Auerbach, noting that although they are Jewish, they had also been uninterested in living in "a Jewish enclave."

Think about it: do members of any other ethnic or religious group take such pains to make sure a listener wouldn't think they wanted to be around too many of their co-religionists? How did Jewishness become part of the mix of factors of concern, Jewishness as the zingy horseradish on top of the gefulte fish of whiteness and high income? The liberal and Jewish guilt practically glows like radioactive plutonium on the page.

I'm glad Fair Haven provides the environment the couple likes for themselves and their family; somehow I doubt their definition of diversity embraces the Tea Party and Orthodox families pushing baby carriages and hanging an eruv.

CFK caught my attention in that tumultuous political year, and I checked out one of their street-theater events at New York's Union Square in October (a fitting month) and, of course, took pictures. The whole troupe brilliantly befuddled observers who couldn't tell how serious they were -- spoofers or real revolutionaries? The photos and captions on the CFK site tell the story. I never fail to laugh at the antics. We need more of their ilk starting right now.

Below, that's Comrade Che to the left.

Go ahead -- feel the love.

2. I like this picture. Where are you in it? (April 10, 7:58 p.m.)

3. Wow! That's Connecticut?! How gorgeous! You look pretty good too. I'm very partial to beards. I like the shirt too. (April 10, 8:11 p.m.)

4. I'm sorry our conversation was cut off so suddenly. The more we communicate, the more I'm looking forward to meeting you. Good night. (April 10, 9:18 p.m.)

5. On an irregular basis, a group of people here hold an alternative minyan. Maybe you'd like to check out this minyan some Shabbat, have lunch here? (April 10, 9:56 p.m.)

6. I was just rereading your profile - I'd love to get a demonstration of both your dancing skills (I've always wanted to know a man who could really dance; my parents were great dancers together), and your Russian skills (mine are rusty now)! Not necessarily simultaneously. (April 13, 7:50 p.m.)

7. Is there a good time this week to talk? Take care, YettaFromYonkers (April 13, 9:44 p.m.)

8. I'm going to be up working for a while, if you want to talk. (April 15, 9:34 p.m.)

9. I enjoyed meeting you also. Sorry about the sore feet, but wasn't it wonderful being outside?! It was quite zooey here this evening, but things have finally quieted down. Please do keep me posted on the book sales. (April 18, 10:19 p.m.)

10. Hi. I hope you're doing well. I just wanted to let you know that I've met someone with whom things have really clicked and I'm going to be focusing my attention there. I'm not someone who can have more than one conversation going at a time. Take care YettaFromYonkers (April 25, 11:55 p.m.)