In the past, I spent my Valentine’s Days watching couple after couple glide into the restaurant I was working at, sliding up to the bar, their eyes beholding a sparkly, dreamy look. They appeared to be in another place altogether, alternating between gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes and frequent “5-second Frenchers.” I would always try to welcome them in with a few libations. Wine was the preferred beverage; though not always red-colored or even the clichéd ‘rose’ blush wine most commonly associated with Valentine’s Day. (Champagne or sparkling wine is most appropriate, actually, according to most food and beverage experts). One of the companions, usually the gentleman, would gaze ever so affectionately at his companion, while she would smile coyly and ever so delicately sip on her chardonnay.

Of course, I had the pleasure of meticulously rubbing out the deep red lipstick stain that would take more than a few runs through the glass washer, while Don Quijote over there managed to squeeze out a two dollar tip on $40 worth of wine and barely acknowledge my presence. I would never grumble— at least out loud. Instead, I would just imagine what it would feel like to have just one Valentine’s Day that did not end with a lonely frozen-dinner and movie, or with me finding some excuse to minimize what it’s all about, or worse have to work behind the bar and watch others celebrate it. And let’s not forget a phone call from mom, just to make sure I’m alright, that I’ll find the right [Jewish] girl, “Soon enough.”

Three years ago, I was single and talking about girls to my mother. This year, I am spending the day with my girlfriend, taking her out to dinner and having a wonderful evening of fun and laughter— and gifts, of course. I don’t think you need to have a significant other to appreciate this holiday and what it’s all about. Just open yourself up, you never know what’s around the corner.

So guys— dress nicely, pick a trendy place, grab a rose (or a bouquet), look clean and presentable, smile a lot and maintain genuine eye contact with your companion. Girls— try not to judge too harshly, compliment on how your companion looks and what place is chosen. Most importantly, whatever you do for Valentine’s Day— single, solo, group outing— have fun and enjoy it.

L’Chaim!

No, I'm not talking about wine. This is a full body workout that you can do at home with little equipment. I used a band and my bodyweight to get a quick workout. If you do each exercise for 30 seconds and repeat the circuit five times, only resting a minute at the end of each circuit, you will have burned a ton of calories in 30 minutes!

The exercises are:
• Wall sit
• Plank
• Walking lateral with band
• Wall press
• Lunges
• Hand walking
• Mountain climbers
• Knee lifts
• Jumping jacks

Check out this video for a simple circuit workout!

Pictured is the author with her sister at her sister’s wedding.

Later this month, I'll be a bridesmaid for the ninth time.

I guess you could say standing up in weddings has become an extra-curricular activity of mine by default. I'm a bridesmaid about as often as people change their clocks for Daylight Saving and Standard Time—about twice a year.

My closet is filled with more long black dresses than Morticia Addams'; I've witnessed more ketubah signings than some rabbis; I've sauntered down more aisles than a Pam Am flight attendant. I've had my photo snapped by wedding photographers more times than Larry King; I've linked hands, dancing in circles with more people than a kindergarten teacher; and I've toasted brides and grooms with more bad jokes than a comedian on a cruise ship.

You would think I'd grow tired of the task, but actually I find it an honor each time I'm asked to stand up for a friend/sister. It's a testament to my friendships with each of these wonderful women who have asked me to celebrate their love and upcoming life's journey with them.

What I love about standing up in these particular weddings is how low-key my bride friends have been. In contrast to the wedding-obsessed culture we live in where four million people tuned in for Kim Kardashian's over-the-top nuptials—my friends shared a grounded sense of perspective at their own haymish weddings.

They saw the triviality of details like what color linens adorned the tables or whether quinoa will be paired with the tilapia option. Instead, they recognized the important stuff like that the wedding is really the launching pad for building wonderful homes with their beshert. They understand that it's all the days after the wedding—the marriage—that really count.

This isn't always the case. I've heard urban legends about—ahem—more "challenging" brides. One friend told me that a bride insisted all her bridesmaids wear the same brand of nylons at her wedding. Note to that bride: If a guest is close enough to a bridesmaid's legs to know the difference, they've got much bigger problems to deal with. Another bride insisted her maid of honor choose a less pretty dress to wear because the bride worried her friend would outshine her. These brides were drunk with power no person should have. Assuming the role of bride shouldn't transform you into ruthless dictator.

My older sister couldn't have approached her nuptials more differently than these bridezillas. Hers was the first wedding I ever stood up in—I was her maid of honor. When I gave the toast at her wedding, as soon as I reached the mike, I started sobbing—so emotional was I to watch my best friend/sister marry a wonderful mensch. The wedding guests obliged me for a full minute before I collected myself enough to deliver my speech. (I've since destroyed the videotape of the toast.)

And before my sister's reception, I recall taking pictures with the other wedding party attendants on a beautiful July 4^th weekend in the Twin Cities. The photographer wanted to film us in a garden outside the Minnesota State Capitol. We trekked through dirt to get to the garden, dressed in tuxedos and long ball gown skirts. My job was to hold up my sister's train away from the soil, but there was so much dirt that the bottom of her pristine white dress got soiled no matter how hard I tried to keep it clean. 

Other brides would have freaked out. But my sister just shrugged. She was marrying the kind, decent man she loved. All the rest was commentary.

A decade later, the dirt-covered dress is just a funny wedding story, and all that matters is she and her husband have a happy marriage that has produced three beautiful sons.

Ninth wedding? Bring it on. It's a mitzvah to dance at a wedding. In fact, Jewish tradition tells us that you should dance at as many weddings as possible. After all, there are unfortunately way too many sad occasions in this world (why else would we break a glass during a wedding ceremony?). So when we can, we should embrace the joys in life wherever we find them.

Is enough enough yet?

We have seen books… movies… songs (this one's NSFW, but it was the first one that came up)… magazines… T-shirts… puppets… even plays.

There is nothing wrong with kitsch. In spoonfuls of sugar. It's when kitsch becomes the meal that I have an issue. It's when Judaism itself is so medicinal it takes, well, this to get it down.

Jewish kitsch has been around for a very, very, very long time. And as you can see by these links, it has mostly been expressed by music.

But today, you can go through the entire year of Jewish holidays, including Shabbat, with kitsch. You can celebrate every part of the Jewish life-cycle with kitsch. It can even be there before a Jewish life has begun (these last two are seriously NSFW).

So when I see that certain Jews relate to their faith, tradition, and people primarily through kitsch, parody, and pop culture, I worry. I worry that some people are using joking-about-Judaism as their main way of identifying as Jewish. As being Jewish.

There is nothing wrong with a spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down. The problem is when you see certain things as "medicine" when they are really the "sugar."

Judaism is not medicine. It is not an unappealing-but-necessary thing. I don't "take" Judaism because I'm sick and it will help me get better. It's not even an apple to help me keep the doctor away.

Judaism is not the medicine—it's the sugar. I don't feel that I'm put-upon because have to be Jewish. I'm lucky because I get to be Jewish.

I get to have a holiday almost every month, plus one every week. I get to have a role in of one of the longest-running shows in human existence. I get to claim the Torah. I get to claim several wonderful languages and musics and literary traditions and cuisines and yes, comedians. Plus a very special slice of the Earth that everybody else wants, just because we said it was special.

As I said, there is nothing wrong with poking fun at Judaism. We Jews have a very good sense of humor about ourselves. In fact, we're sorta famous for it.

But when we predominantly see Judaism through the lenses of humor and parody, it becomes hard to take it seriously at all. And when Jewish jokes become Judaism, I'm afraid that the joke will be on us.

Andy in 2004, March 2011 and Jan. 2012 

Pull out your driver's license and look at what you listed as your weight. Mine says 175. I got that license about 5 years ago. Never in my adult life has my scale read the number on my license. That is until the beginning of this year when I passed an important milestone. I actually weighed what my license said I weighed. In fact, as I write this post, I am actually four and a half pounds under that number.

Two years ago, I wrote a post called, "100 Reasons to Live," where I publically acknowledged my addiction to food and my hopes of beating it. It took some time to do the work and build up the courage to face my anxieties and fears and issues with food. I even gained some more pounds back after writing that piece. At the same time, I never gave up and the response I received from telling that story, continued to inspire me. In March of 2011, with the support of my wife, I went for more help re-joining a Weight Watchers Program. The scale began to dial back again.

Over the last year, I have lost over 50 pounds. Around 10 more pounds from here, and I will be within the recommended range for Body Mass Index of 25. I will have made the journey from just over 300 pounds in 2004, to just over 160, eight years later. For the first time in my life, I won't be considered medically overweight. For the first time ever, I won't be fat. It feels liberating to be relieved of all of that physical and emotional baggage.

The cat litter we usually buy (the kind in the large plastic buckets) weighs around 25 pounds. Imagine carrying one of those in each hand, all day, every day. That is what it means to be 50 pounds overweight. A window air-conditioning unit weighs around 50 pounds. Try taking two air-conditioning units out of your window and carrying one on each shoulder. Can you imagine how you would feel at the end of just one day? Imagine the extra strain on the joints, the muscles, and the heart. Now imagine that feeling every day, all day, all of your life. That is the feeling of being crushed by 100 pounds of extra weight.

Someone recently asked me if I feel like a whole new person from all this weight loss? You lose a lot with 100 pounds or 50 pounds or any pounds of weight loss for that matter, and in the process you gain perspective. My relationship to food, to my body and to others has forever been changed. Maybe I really am a whole new person. At the very least, I definitely lost the equivalent weight of one person.

We walk into the dining room, and heads turn. Diners stop eating and point. Faces light up. The wait staff, recognizing our arrival, scurries to the kitchen for the appropriate supplies. Ben, my two-and-a-half-year-old celebrity, leads me to an open table, stopping every so often to slap someone five or accept a small gift, usually a bag of oyster crackers. The scenario replays every week, sometimes twice a week, each time we visit my grandmothers at their respective independent living facilities.

Once we are settled at the table, the visitors trickle over to ruffle Ben’s hair, ask him how old he is, and compliment his excellent behavior. They shake his hand, ask him if his food is good, and sneak him cookies when they think I’m not looking. Always eager to please, Ben explains to his fans that he is two, that he is always a good boy, and that there are eggs and fruit on his plate. Sometimes he even grants hugs and kisses, if he’s in a particularly good mood.

After each person says goodbye, Ben will ask, “Why was he in a chair?” or “What was in her nose?” and I try to explain the inevitable deterioration of the human body in a way that a toddler can understand. I also breathe a sigh of relief that he somehow knows to hold his questions until after they are out of earshot.

Ben’s biggest fan is Wanda. Several months ago, much like the other admirers, Wanda began appearing at our table with presents. But Wanda, unlike the other admirers, gifted Matchbox cars and toy planes. She would pick up a trinket during the week and carry it around with her all day, every day, until she was able to give it to Ben.

My grandma told me that Wanda has great-grandchildren of her own but doesn’t see them often, and that she gets such pleasure just seeing Ben around. As a thank you for all of her generous gifts, Ben drew a Happy Holidays picture for her, which she told me she framed and hung on her wall.

I marvel at the amount of joy this child brings to Wanda and the rest of the residents, and am grateful that we have the opportunity to do a mitzvah simply by visiting my grandmothers. Ben happily doles out hugs, with no understanding that his is the only hug some of these people will get for awhile. The thought makes me want to hug him extra tight, and try to impress upon him the importance of these small acts of human kindness.

After one recent lunch, as we were walking out of the dining room, one of the ladies grabbed my arm and said, “I watched your son the whole time I was here, and I want you to know he made my day.”

Even if Ben is too young now to understand the power he has to do good, I will make sure to tell him about this lady, and about Wanda and all his other fans, in the hope that he makes the conscious choice throughout his life to continue performing these small acts of kindness.

Yesterday, for whatever reason, my order at Argo Tea was taking longer than expected. "No worries," I said to the girl behind the counter. "I was a coffee shop wench for four years. I understand."

"Coffee shop wench" wasn't my official title, but I do have a pretty outsized fondness for the time I spent behind the counter at Ex Libris, the subterranean pit stop in the basement of the Regenstein Library, which I used to call "the tomb with coolers." Ex Libris (the eX, more properly) has been on my mind lately. An article recently crossed my path showing off the new location: above ground, and full of natural light. Now the employees are "student baristas."

I'm torn between envy and old-timer rage, a position shared by my fellow alums—as it should be. My "coffee shop wenching" was the one constant throughout my four years of college, more so than friendships, coursework, extracurriculars, life plans and living situations. When I started, I was carting my music with me in a huge CD folder; Ex Libris was the first place I saw iPods in wide use. It was also the first place I saw people using Facebook. When I think about it, a lot happened in the world while I was descending those stairs for twenty hours or so per week.

I found out there were still openings for coveted student-run coffee shop jobs the second week of my first quarter at school, Fall 2002. I had never had a job before, but I desperately wanted to not rely on my parents for disposable income. I came to my interview dressed like I was up for an office job; Sue, the general manager at the time, was six feet tall with heavy eye makeup, tons of silver jewelry and long black hair. She kind of terrified me, but I got the job; later, we bonded over our love of Moby-dick and all things Melville. Turns out I was well suited to the work. I liked interacting with people, and once I got comfortable with things like stocking shelves and making coffee, a few broken carafes aside, I was happy there.

It was a good place to be a misfit: we played that up—why else would we spend so many of our extracurricular hours in a lightless sub-basement of a massive concrete Brutalist library? I used to blast Bjork, Tibetan monks and ear-shattering Jon Spencer Blues Explosion tracks on our three-foot speakers in protest of the constant rotation of Bon Jovi, System of a Down and Guns'n'Roses. (Music was a huge deal; I learned more about music and musical discoveries there than just about anywhere else.) I also once accidentally "berated" Sara Tanaka (Margaret Yang from Rushmore) for taking the wrong size coffee cup. (I didn't know who she was, and she paid for a medium and took a large or something—I just pointed out the mediums, and after she'd left, Rebecca asked me why I chased her away. "Now she'll never come back!") We often cast each other in movies or TV shows on the big chalkboard next to the counter; once I came in to find that in our Godfather lineup, I was Luca Brasi, he who wishes for masculine children and sleeps with the fishes.

Ex Libris taught me a lot about human nature: about people spilling whole gallons of milk and walking away hoping no one would notice; about customers constantly asking if we had milk or honey or sugar or spoons or microwaves, despite the huge signs and humming coolers indicating just that; about students who hadn't seen sunlight in two days emerging from the A-Level to demand coffee; about handling outside vendors with their own ideas about food delivery. There were the creepy customers, who braved keeping lines behind them to chat us up whenever and for however long they could, and there were awesome customers, who bantered with me for four years despite my never learning their names. And there were my coworkers, who embraced the make-it-yourself ethic in everything from gaming centers to get-togethers, to say the least.

As much as I'm cherry-picking the good parts, part of me is sad that no one else will have that experience. The new Ex Libris is going to be its own creature, which it should be, and of course, there are other student-run coffee shops on campus with a similar ethos to ours (though I'm obligated to dispute that they'll ever be a sufficient facsimile). Being an alumna hardly dictates that my way is the best way or that my experience is somehow no longer valid.

And let's be fair: for all that we did with that fluorescent-lit, cooler-humming, milk-spilled, cramped, decorated-by-collage, pumping-with-strange-music space—and what we did was mighty—I can't put down wanting access to sunlight.

Best of luck to the new iteration, Ex Libris. Have fun becoming what you'll be next.