Yay!

I like it when you meet someone in the world who lingers with you, like, say, a slash of color you accidentally got on your jeans when you swiped your pen along your thigh. Some people don't come out in the wash. I like it.

I've been trying to find you a link to a hilarious story I read in the New Yorker last week by Shalom Auslander. He writes about giving up Orthodox Judaism during the 1994 Stanley Cup playoffs. God bless his demented wife Orli and his demented self—they walked 14 miles from Teaneck, N.J., on the Sabbath to watch the Rangers play at Madison Square Garden. On a screen. (It was an away game in Canada.)

Here's a part of the story that I particularly like. It takes place in his childhood:

"One was always forbidden to eat pig, at least until the Messiah arrived—only then, Rabbi Goldfisher taught us in the fourth grade, would the wicked be punished, and the dead be resurrected, and the pigs be kosher.

"'Yay!' I said, high-fiving my best friend, Dov."

[I'm a big fan of men who write "Yay!" Duh.]

Fucking wind tonight makes my fingers too cold to actually be properly functional. They feel like tentacles. (I have jellyfish on the brain tonight. Jellyfish are supercool.) This is, however, part of the delight of living on the top floor of a 105-year-old building in Brooklyn. Wind whips in ropey sounds that you can envision circling from your borough to the skyscrapers downtown. Ribbonlike.