I am obsessed with food and eating. Dear G-d in Heaven, I wish I could have a piece of chocolate. I have a bad, bad craving. When I get home tonight I�m going to try baking chocolate macaroons to tide me over, but all I have is cocoa so we�ll see how that goes. Next year I must remember to procure some real chocolate bars.

But, on the plus side, I baked a yummy kugel last night. It�s like a regular sweet noodle kugel--eggs, milk, cottage cheese, honey, and cinnamon--but with broken-up matzah instead of noodles. It is easy and custardy and YUMMY. Thank goodness I like it, because there�s a lot of it and I doubt that J can be convinced to eat it. Last night I asked him what he wanted for dinner and he replied, �The bread of affliction.� Wiseacre. Later he ate a pound of strawberries, an apple, two sheets of matzah (plain), one sheet of matzah with strawberry jam, and half a pint of tiny tomatoes. What an odd child. It�s like he�s a raw foodist.

I don�t think I mentioned here that I went to a community seder the first night of Passover. It was pretty awful. I sat at a table with a number of people who seemed generally opposed to small talk or socializing. Maybe there was a theme I didn�t know about, like �One-Word Answers ONLY,� or something. Or maybe they hated me. Who knows. Also, the food wasn�t very good. At least now I know which kosher caterer to avoid like the plague, though. They actually ran out of salad, and everything else was some shade of brown: tsimmes, potato kugel, farfel-mushroom stuffing, meatballs, chicken, macaroons, everything. Brown, all brown. Ugh.

There�s a positive side to this, too, though: As I walked home with all that brown food sitting in my stomach like a cannonball, I decided that I will assemble some proper Passover supplies so I can host my own seders eventually. I can make a list now and acquire things gradually so I�ll be ready for next year. I already have a seder plate that has never been used--a very good start.

So. I am seeing Mark again tomorrow night and I still haven�t figured out what his problem is. I am trying my darndest to look at him sans my rose-colored glasses, and waiting for him to show me who he really is under the super-nice veneer. He has all these great qualities, and he�s not shy, so maybe he really IS a commitment-phobe. (That would be another good reason not to sleep with him.) I wonder how long I will have to date him and how much I will grow to like him before it becomes apparent that he has no interest in staying with one woman for very long.

Or maybe I�m thinking of someone else. I don�t even recognize my suspicious, apprehensive self. In the past I have tried and tried to be like this, and now I just am, and I feel like I lost something. It was more fun to have hope, that�s for sure, but I guess suspicion is probably wiser. Maybe one of these days I�ll find a magic state of mind that falls precisely in the middle.

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