As a twenty-something journalist living in Chicago, my daily rush consists of commuting, interviewing, writing and sometimes remembering to eat. Despite the madness, I have a side hobby. I love collecting recipes, and one of my most cherished possessions is a huge cookbook I’ve been compiling over the past year. In fact, some friends poke fun that I bake to de-stress.

As the saying goes: “It’s a small Jewish world.” I say, “Use it.” I was on the phone with a friend the other day, recapping a funny Saturday night we’d had at a party. The hosts were from Deerfield and she and I are from Highland Park.  We knew the hosts and a few of their friends. After playing some serious, Jewish geography that evening, it wasn’t long until about 50 of us discovered we were mishpuchah.

In a recent article for Triblocal, I interviewed Riverwoods resident and professional videographer Dan Gelfond about his experiences as an interviewer for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

There is nothing like a Jewish mother’s love. She loves so deeply that she wants her daughter’s life to be filled with love too—but, he must be Jewish. I was sitting at work late one Tuesday afternoon and my mother called me, her voice filled with adrenaline. She had just come home from the grocery store, and apparently she tried to pick up a little more than milk and eggs.

For a recent article I wrote for Triblocal, I interviewed a Jewish couple living in Highland Park that is about as nontraditional as it gets. The two met later in life after previous marriages, already had their own children and are now enjoying their marriage of only about five years. The husband is an African American male who converted to Judaism in his 30s; the wife was born Jewish and scarcely identified with her roots. Together, they’ve found Judaism in perhaps an unusual place—a comic book.

I’ve been thinking about Halloween a lot lately, and this year I have been a bit stumped about what to wear. When I was little, my idea of the perfect costume was simple. I usually went as some variation on a witch. One year I even went as a baby witch: I wore a witch’s dress and hat and carried around an absurdly large plastic baby bottle.

Just as we do around the High Holidays, I think New Year’s and the subsequent weeks after provide a good time for introspection and goal setting. In fact, I think society might be a whole lot healthier if people took quarterly inventories of their lives.

Perhaps, the Canadians have young Jewish women figured out better than anybody. Recently, I have become enamored with the show, Being Erica—so much so, that it made my highly selective DVR list a couple weeks ago.

Nothing brings religion more prominently to the forefront in a relationship than milestones like marriage and having a baby. The scenario becomes, perhaps, more interesting or complex in a situation of mixed marriage—or so goes the Jewish, parental parable I’ve heard since my emergence from the womb. 

I’ve lived around my fair share of dog lovers. One needs only to trace some of the cities and neighborhoods I’ve lived in: Growing up in Highland Park, I saw owners dress their pets in hats, sweaters, dresses and bedazzled collars and serve their dogs in Evian-filled water dishes; in London, where I studied abroad, I found an entire Burberry-for-dogs clothing line in Harrods department store and lived across from a park filled to the brim with Sunday-afternoon dog-walkers.

A few weeks ago, my friend invited me to a costume party. There were no witches or vampires. Instead, our task was to dress as a stereotype. Ironically, while many of us seek slutty versions of everyday professionals for our Halloween costumes in October, my friends and I all went maternal in April.

As for many Chicagoans in their mid-20s, for me, this past spring and early summer has meant two things: weddings and moving…and, well, more weddings. While moving is a time when one must decide which memories to hold onto, weddings are a time to make new ones.

While the Chavis family is one of Eastern European descent, my sister and I have a running joke in which we affectionately refer to ourselves as The Sisters Chavez—a wordplay on the novel called The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The joke, however, has nothing to do with the novel. I am, if nothing else, an English major nerd at heart.