Kidnapping Kalman: A Lesson in the Exodus

This past Monday, Miriam and I hosted a kiddush in honor of Kalman's third birthday. This came with speaking privileges, which I decided to take advantage of. 

Do you see this Kalman here?  I am sure many of you would like to kidnap him. How would you go about doing it? On the surface, it would seem to be a simple task. Pick the boy up and walk out. Now here is where things get tricky. You see, even though Kalman is small, he can kick, and scream and he really likes Mommy. So brute force would not actually be practical for more than a brief period of time. What is needed would be to keep Kalman from realizing that he is being kidnapped for as long as possible. Tell him: "Let me help you find your parents. ... Your parents asked me to look after you for a little bit. ... I will take you home in the morning." Eventually, Kalman will realize that you are lying to him. (He is a very smart boy.) That being said, if you keep control of him long enough, you will eventually be able to make the case that he has been abandoned and that no one loves him anymore. He has no one but you so he might as well make the best of the situation. It should be noted that, in the case of most kidnapping cases, this can go on for years as the victims come to engage in behavior that appears from the outside to be compliance with the captor and even downright acceptance of their situation. 

One of the interesting questions in regards to the Exodus story is why bother going through the whole process of speaking to Pharoah, inflicting the Ten Plagues upon him, and then baiting him into destroying his army at the Red Sea. With the might of God, Moses should have been able to march the Israelites right out of Egypt without even having to talk to Pharoah and get his permission. A way of thinking about it is to say that the real story was never really about getting Pharoah to let the Israelites go, but getting the Israelites to agree to leave. The Israelites loved their Egyptian masters and would have never agreed to leave on their own. Moses, therefore, needed Pharoah to order the Israelites to leave and to trick the Israelites into believing that they were just going for a few days to worship God. Hence, Moses only asked for a temporary leave and told the Israelites to borrow vessels from their neighbors. What kind of borrowing is it if you are never coming back? 

The Exodus did not free the Israelites. They were "kidnapped" from being Pharoah's slaves to God's. In this, the crossing of the Red Sea played a critical role. Once the Israelites saw Egyptians dead on the shore they knew that this was not some temporary outing, but that they were never going back. Pharoah was no longer their master, God was. Israel needed to accept that and make the best of the situation. 

Nearly six years ago, I came out to Pasadena for the summer. I somehow seem to find that I am still here with a wife and a Kalman. My parents have told her: "No backsies." So I guess I am stuck; I might as well make the best of the situation. I love my wife and my Kalman and do not want to be free from them. 

The New MacGyver Reboot is Lame (and I am Not Just Saying That Because They Did Not Include My House)

A few months ago, my in-law's house was taken over for the shooting of a pilot for a reboot of the classic show MacGyver. For those unfamiliar with it, MacGyver features a genius secret agent, who manages to make all kinds of useful things on the fly from what he finds about himself. My in-laws got to live in a hotel for a week. Since we live in the guest house, we got to stay. It was cool to go outside and see the production. Everyone we encountered was really nice for letting us watch and not complaining that we got in the way. The episode was supposed to feature a wedding, shot in the garden. Miriam and I were married in that garden. How cool was it going to be to say we got married in the same place as a television wedding. The interior of the house itself was supposed to be MacGyver's house.

I was looking forward to seeing the show and being able to pick out what stuff was shot at the house. In fact, an early trailer featured a sequence shot on our front steps. It turns out that the original pilot was scrapped. So far it seems that MacGyver is going to be living at someone else's house. No hard feelings. It was a fun experience. What I find more frustrating, having become invested in the show, is that it is pretty terrible. The show's flaws are worth examing as an exercise in what can go wrong with an action/comedy.

It does not take much to imagine this show being pitched as a 24 with a tongue and cheek sense of humor, something like Chuck. If I were that producer, I am sure I would have been tempted to greenlight the project. The problem is, as my father once taught me, comedy is the hardest kind of acting to do. The material can sound great on paper, but you get out there and it just does not work. With drama, you can save some entertainment value even if things fall apart. There is no saving comedy that is simply not funny. What is particularly perilous about comedy is that it is all too easy to try saving a failed drama by deciding it is a comedy. You find the story stupid; well you do not appreciate that it was supposed to be funny.

This is exponentially the case when doing tongue and cheek. The temptation is to take material that lacks the laughs to be a comedy and lacks the plot and characters to be drama and call it tongue and cheek. To do tongue and cheek comedy properly you need something that works both as drama and as comedy. The difference between successful and failed tongue and cheek is the difference between Joss Whedon's Avengers and Zach Synder's Justice League or the original Star War films and the prequels. In both cases, the superiority of the former is matched by the difficulty in explaining why, particularly for anyone working on the project, not seeing the final product. With the later, we simply do not care about the characters or what happens to them so when they say something that is supposed to be funny it just sounds dumb.

The first episode of MacGyver (and here is to hoping it improves) featured plenty twists, turns and moments of peril mixed with banter packed into forty minutes that should have made it a fun ride. I mean MacGyver's love interest gets killed in the first few minutes in an operation gone south. The team needs to capture a biological weapon before it causes global mayhem. As it turns out, the love interest was a double agent who faked her death, leading to an intense standoff with MacGyver. In terms of action and peril, this episode probably outdoes most episodes of 24. On top of that, MacGyver has a sardonic older military side-kick and a clueless black roommate, telling jokes. So why do I think the show was a waste of time? Someone thought that peril and jokes could substitute for characters we care about when peril and jokes only work if we care about the characters. It is useful to compare the plot of MacGyver to 24. Season one of 24 ended with the revelation that Nina Myers had been a double agent the entire time and she murders Jack Bauer's wife. This was dramatically effective because we spent an entire season liking Nina and becoming invested in her complex relationship with Jack. She is his tech support and the main person he trusts at CTU even as they once had an affair and Jack is now trying to repair his marriage. Nina returns in seasons two and three and is an effective villain precisely because we get how she brings out Jack's anger and guilt. This emotional foundation allows Nina to be a formidable physical danger as well, capable of getting the edge on Jack.

I can easily imagine the material for the MacGyver episode working over the course of several episodes. After spending an entire season becoming invested in MacGyver's relationship with his techie, in a season-ending cliffhanger, she dies in a mission and MacGyver is left floating in a lake with a bullet in his shoulder. We pick up the next season with the bad guys still having their WMD and MacGyver coming back into the field. This would have provided some actual emotional heft for him to find out out that his love betrayed him. This would be a conflict with intrigue. Give me that and I might even start laughing at some of the jokes.

Teaching the Story of King David and Bathsheba: How to Groom Children for Abuse

Recently, during a study session with a student, I gave him a list of my five most disturbing stories in the Bible. I ranked the story of King David and Bathsheba as number three. For those unfamiliar with the story, King David has an affair with Bathsheba and then orders her husband, Uriah, killed off in battle in order to cover up the fact that he got her pregnant. The prophet Nathan rebukes David, who repents. Then, in the most troubling part of the story, God chooses to kill the baby, the most innocent person in this whole sordid incident, rather than killing David like he deserves (Samuel II 11-12).

In Haredi schools, the standard way to handle this story is to refer to the Talmud, which states that anyone who thinks that David sinned is mistaken. The reason for this is that soldiers traditionally divorced their wives before going to battle in case they disappeared so Bathsheba was technically single. She went to the mikvah so she was ritually pure. Uriah was liable to the death penalty because he placed Joab's name before David's. This line of thinking is used to buttress the notion that the biblical heroes were totally righteous. In essence, Haredim want to turn the Bible into the hagiographic biographies published by Artscroll. I can testify from my own experience as a student and from speaking to the kids I tutor, that this kind of education is spiritually destructive.

It occurred to me that there is a productive way to teach about David and Bathsheba, using the Talmud to make the opposite point. Yes, David did not sin and there are two things that you should learn from this. First, if you are a clever enough Torah scholar you could find a justification for anything, even adultery, and murder. To all my married female readers, if we think hard and creatively enough, we can find a way to invalidate your marriages. (The Catholics have gotten really good at this.) If we scour the corpus of Jewish mysticism we can even find reasons why it is a mitzvah to sleep with me. Clearly, it is not Pharisaic legalism that will keep me faithful to my beloved Miriam, but personal integrity. As my teacher, R. Aryeh Klapper likes to say: "The great secret of rabbinic Judaism is that you can justify anything on halakhic grounds. It is important that this remains a secret because the moment people realize this it will be the end of rabbinic Judaism." Ultimately, what stops us from declaring ham and orgies kosher is a loyalty to Judaism as a concept and a sense of what Judaism needs in order to survive.

This leads to my second point. David did not sin, but he deserved to die. We can accept every word of the Talmud's defense and it does not change Nathan's powerful denunciation of David one iota. On the contrary, Nathan's words gain strength as we are forced to reckon with the enormity of David's "wrongdoing" without recourse to simple sins such as adultery and murder. Imagine if we caught the world's greatest Torah scholar in a brothel. We drag him in front of Agudah's Council of Torah Sages to answer the charges against him. Because he is such a great Torah scholar, he might refute anyone who claims that he sinned. For example, the Torah upholds the world and is literally the equivalent of serving in the army. Thus, the continued studies of such a great Torah scholar are literally a matter of life and death. Thus, he must literally do "anything" to increase his Torah knowledge and it is a great mitzvah for any woman (as well as any man if that is what is called for) to aid him in any way they can. Obviously, in a time of such national emergency, things that look like sexual immorality are the acts of greatest holiness. It is people who fail to appreciate the true importance of Torah who are the real sinners. Does accepting his arguments redeem this man and allow him to return to his former position of respect in the community? No, the fact that he is able to defend himself so ably makes his actions all the worse. Now, he is no longer simply a tragic sinner, who could not control himself but a threat to the survival of Judaism itself. If his defense gets out, it will bring down Judaism in a way that a fallen Torah scholar never could. Thus, we would have no choice but to kill him.

I am frightened of the implications of allowing teachers to claim that what David did was ok and that God was only judging David very harshly because he was such a righteous man and he should not have done something that even looked improper. (Note that telling kids that this was anything less than a supremely terrible deed is saying that it was ok). We are teaching children that it is possible for something that looks like a great sin to be basically ok if it involves a "holy" person. Recent years have offered plenty of evidence that my Torah scholar in a brothel scenario is not a silly hypothetical. Whether consciously or not (it hardly matters) teachers are grooming students to become the victims of such men.

The problem of predators in our community is not simply a matter of a few bad apples but cuts at the heart of our educational system. I salute organizations like Project Y.E.S. and books like Let's Stay Safe for their efforts to bring about meaningful change.

On Board the Queen Mary with Jewlicious and Mayim Bialik

When I first contacted Miriam a year ago, her first email to me was that she could not talk to me for the next few weeks because the Limmud LA conference and Jewlicious festival were just around the corner. So I was pleased to join Miriam in attending this year's Jewlicious 8.0 festival as her lawfully bagged, captured and tamed husband.

The event was hosted on the Queen Mary liner, which is permanently parked in Long Beach, CA and operates as a museum and hotel. Stepping on board was enough to send me into libertarian seasteading fantasies of a privately owned miniature city floating out in international waters. Unfortunately, I later found out that, after it was retired, the Queen Mary was bought by the city of Long Beach, which was kind enough to add on a tourism tax on our room bill. So much for escaping big government. For those of you planning a kosher cruise for Passover, the Queen Mary was the first ship designed with a kosher kitchen; it even had its own line of specially designed kosher dishes.

In addition to great food at Jewlicious 8.0, there was a parade of comic and musical performances Saturday night and Sunday. At the Sunday concert, I was privileged to finally hear a live performance by Seth Glass. I was familiar with Seth's work from a CD, "Question of Faith," I found at my father's house years ago. I listened to that CD to death, but unfortunately I never ran into anything else by Seth. When he started performing it all of a sudden struck me who he was and I surprised him by asking for "The King is in the Field," my favorite song from the CD. He is an extremely talented musician who never got the attention and fans he deserves. (Perhaps not unlike a certain blogger, but I digress.)

Jewlicious is a non-denominational Jewish organization for young professionals in Los Angeles under the leadership of Rabbi Yonah Bookstein. In many respects, it represents where left-wing Orthodoxy and traditionalist Judaism, which make up the majority of Jewlicious' audience, may be heading. Jewlicious is nominally under Orthodox auspices, is strictly kosher and focuses on the study of texts as a vehicle for increased observance. Thus it could easily be tagged as an Orthodox outreach program. That being said, the primary ideology preached at Jewlicious seems to be one of Judaism as expressed through activism, mainly of a left-wing variety. For example, Rabbi Yonah spoke about his experiences with Occupy LA. (Unfortunately, I was not able to make it to this presentation as it conflicted with my talk about messianism.) There was also a panel of Jewish activists whose fields ranged from using Talmudic style dialectics to confront contemporary issues to saving the redwood trees and helping the homeless. There were a number of things conspicuously absent that would have certainly been present if this program were being run by traditional Orthodox outreach programs like Chabad or Aish. While Israel and Zionism were represented as an integral part of Jewish culture, there was little about Israeli politics and the Palestinian conflict. There was no Jewish theology in the sense of Maimonides' principles of faith that one must believe in. Also, there was no sense of halacha as something mandated by God. Instead, discussions of Jewish law were framed as something people choose to do as a means of leading a more meaningful and spiritual life.

This particular brand of Judaism (call it neo-traditionalism or "modern frumkeit" if you like) was exemplified in the event's guest of honor, Mayim Bialik. For those of you not familiar with her, Mayim Bialik plays Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory, probably the most consistently modestly dressed character in the history of modern television. Before I say anything else, let me add that I found Mayim to be an exceptionally down to Earth and friendly person as well as a terrific speaker. What struck me about hearing her speak is that she came across as a very "frum" person with her discussion of her commitment to tzniut dress and learning. Forget about Modern Orthodoxy, Mayim, if she wanted to, could easily fit in with a Haredi community. Yet she referred to herself as "observantish," acknowledging that not everything in her life fits with Orthodoxy as traditionally defined. Her theology, to the extent that she spoke of it between her two public presentations, seems to rest on a strong belief in God as a creator and moral guide and a commitment to Jewish law as an ongoing process in which one strives to increase observance but is not an all or nothing deal.

I found it particularly interesting that Mayim made use of the categories of observant and non-observant while seeming to acknowledge how poorly they applied to her. These categories were the creation of Orthodoxy to take Reform and Conservative Judaism out of the picture. Instead of different denominations, there are observant Jews who keep halacha and there are those non-observant Jews ensnared by assimilation, who need to be brought back into the fold through shabbos dinners and outreach programs. Of course, these categories could also be used to take the "dox" out of Orthodoxy and since no one is perfect even the most Orthodox is really only "observantish."

The Orthodoxy in which I was raised would not have known what to do with Mayim. For that matter, I am not sure how well Orthodoxy is prepared for even the Orthodox members of Jewlicious. They seem comfortable in operating as Jews in a non-Orthodox environment, thus breaking down the lines between observant and non-observant and even Orthodox and Conservative. Such a Judaism, while formally halachic, effectively eliminates any need for an Orthodox community. On a practical level, these people do not live in a world of separated sexes so traditional taboos against touching a member of the opposite sex or for men to listen to women singing are non-existent. There is also little ingrained opposition to homosexuality.

People in their 20s, particularly in this generation, are naturally in flux and in search of identity. However these participants evolve, it would seem that traditional Orthodoxy loses. Our Orthodox members of Jewlicious could follow the path toward non-observance, which according to the Orthodox narrative is the inevitable result of stepping outside the Orthodox social structure or they could evolve their own variation of traditional observance, which would be markedly different than common Orthodoxy and may even present a greater challenge to it. Due to its narrative, Orthodoxy is not equipped to respond to educated and committed Jews, who fall outside the Orthodox system.
       
Arguably this model of neo-traditionalism I am outlining, with its non-interest in theology and commitment to a Jewish community that includes a range of observance levels, is more in tune with Judaism as it has historically existed than Orthodoxy. That could prove a powerful rhetorical weapon in the battle to define Orthodoxy in the next generation. Can Orthodoxy step in and provide a Judaism to accommodate members of the Jewlicious community? By this, I mean even those who identify as Orthodox. The choice may be between taking the initiative for making changes now while it still might be possible to maintain some say or sit back, pat oneself on the back for holding the line against change and surrendering all say in the Judaism that comes out of events like Jewlicious.

The BZ and Miriam Wedding Skit

Aspergers are often accused of suffering from "mind blindness" and lacking a "theory of mind," a notion that other people think differently. I see this as a more general problem with the human mind. Aspergers, having the misfortune of being born with minds that are more different than most, simply are likely to reach a crisis moment in their mind blindness far sooner than most. It is possible for the neurotypical mind to spend a lifetime with neurotypicals of similar economic and social class and of the same creed and never realize that in fact other people are different. It is easy to intellectually say the words "everyone is different," but to, at a subconscious level, believe it requires work. A simple test to see if you suffer from mind blindness is to ask yourself if you believe that you are capable of forming empathetic links with others. If you do so despite the fact that human beings lack the means of engaging in telepathic communication then you need help not just for mind blindness, but for a general lack of consistent rationalist thinking. If you recognize that your sense of other people's feelings is merely your fantasy of what other people might be feeling, albeit a socially useful fantasy, then you can congratulate yourself for your hard won rationalism in the face of societal superstition. (See Neurotypical Menetal and Emotional Handicaps.)

I believe that everyone, Aspergers and neurotypicals, needs to work on their theory of mind skills. In addition to having logical and scientific reasoning integrated into one's daily life, another helpful method I have found is theater. In this I must admit a debt of gratitude to Dr. Anthony Beukas of the Yeshiva College Dramatics Society, from whom I learned this. There is something to be said about spending weeks and months in someone else's mind. You walk into the theater, from the moment you are first handed a script to the final curtain, you are someone else. Being a good actor does not just mean memorizing lines and blocking. The character needs to be a "real" person to you with a complete history full of thoughts, desires and motives that go beyond the script and inform every line spoken and every glance. To do this properly requires one to recognize and accept that the character being played is fundamentally different from oneself. One needs to take a step back and allow oneself to fade into the background to allow the character to come into existence as a true person.

Despite the fact that Miriam and I both are Aspergers, we are both different people with different interests and ways of reacting to the world. What being Aspergers gives us is a sense of being different from others and a recognition of a common set of developed survival mechanisms. For example Miriam is much more socially outgoing than I am,  much better at starting conversations and making friends. Meeting Miriam forces you to discard the stereotypes of Aspergers as cold and anti-social; she is anything but that. While our outward methods of social interaction are different, we both consciously work from a mental checklist of lines to deliver to people. In a way social interaction for us is just another type of theater in which you play a part. Above all else what we have in common is that we both learned a long time ago that the only way we were going to survive navigating through society is if we verbally explained our thoughts to others, instead of just imagining they would intuitively understand us, and had others verbally explain their thought to us, instead of imagining we could intuitively understand them. Miriam and I have a good relationship and understand each other fairly well not because we are so much alike, but because we are good at talking to each other, particularly about our differences.

Drawing from my theater experience, little game that I invented for us, as a means of thinking about our relationship and explaining how we relate to each other to others, is the BZ and Miriam skit. I play her and she plays me. She tends to play BZ as dour with a penchant for monologuing. I tend to play Miriam as jumpy and ecstatic with a touch more common sense than BZ. When we first gave a public performance of a BZ and Miriam skit at the kiddish her parents sponsored in our honor, BZ ended up lecturing the audience on the differences between ritual murder and blood libel charges with Miriam asking him if this made him happy and if he could please do the dishes while he talked.

Here is the BZ and Miriam skit from our wedding on October 30, 2011. For some reason I failed to notice that the wedding was scheduled at the same time as the Pittsburgh Steelers were playing the New England Patriots. Even more mysterious is the fact that the sizable contingent of Steeler fans in my family came to the wedding and missed what was probably the highlight of the Steeler season. (Congratulation to New York Giant fans on beating the Patriots in the Super Bowl.)

          

Engagement Party

Miriam and I are having an engagement party on August 14th. If any of my readers from the Los Angeles area wish to come feel free to contact me and ask.

I am Engaged to a Wonderful Jewish Asperger Girl (Part II)

(Part I)

So how did I propose to my one and only dream Jewish Asperger girl? Well, like in most relationships I suspect, she really proposed to me while allowing me the pretense of going through the motions of asking her to maintain the facade of my manly control in this relationship. So a few weeks ago Miriam announced to me that she intended to have an engagement party in August. Naturally, I was curious as to who would play the role of the groom at this engagement party and decided to volunteer my services before some other guy tried out for the part. This past Sunday, I took Miriam to the Aquarium of the Pacific. In the last post, I mentioned that Miriam's special interest is the South Pacific. It is actually much more specific than that; it is in Palau. In case you have never heard of Palau they are a group of islands several hundred miles to the east of the Philippines. (Lionel Spiegel had heard of them because of some of the tropical life off its coasts.)

(Here I passed her test to find Palau on a map, thus making myself a suitable partner for marriage. Naturally, any person with designs on world conquest has to know something about geography.)


The aquarium possesses an entire section on coral reefs based on the ones off Palau. Thus making it the perfect set piece to stand in for Miriam's favorite place in the universe.

How to make it a surprise? The disadvantage of being an Asperger is that it makes you a really bad liar. The advantage of dating an Asperger is that they are very easy to lie to. So I simply told Miriam that I was taking her out on a simple date to the aquarium with a picnic dinner. She believed me. To confirm her belief she checked on a bottle of wine we had just bought to see if it was still in its place. It was. I simply grabbed it afterward when she was not looking and stuck it in my knapsack.

So we headed to the aquarium. As a good boyfriend, I obviously let Miriam take the lead and she took me straight to the Palau exhibit. That finished we went through the rest of the museum. (For some strange reason the people who run the aquarium think that people want to do things that have no connection to Palau like pet sharks.) Heading out of the aquarium, I suggested that we go back one more time through Palau. I then told her to find the most magical place in the exhibit. She parked herself right in front of the red snapper fish. (Miriam, like me, tends to associate love with eating even as she fails to apply this philosophy to its logical conclusion of kitty and human.) While having her stare into the fish tank, I stood behind her and said: "I know nothing of the customs of Palau, how they ask certain questions, but as a western imperialist, I feel entitled to simply make up whatever Palauan customs I wish. So I going to do it this way. Miriam, would you turn around?" She turned around and I asked her the question that was burning on my mind at the moment. "Would you have dinner with me by the shore?"

So we walked to the shore and had a sunset picnic dinner with leechee fruit, which grows in Palau, for dessert. Afterward, we walked along the shore toward the setting sun. I then had Miriam look out to over the water to the sun and once again spoke to her: "This is the closest we can get to Palau without a boat or plane, but I promise we will go there eventually."

She then turned around, and I had pulled out the bottle of wine. She then went into gasps of "oh my god" a bunch of times, before eventually kindly allowing me to ask her an embarrassing question that did not involve food.

I already know where we are going for our honeymoon. I hear some of the islands near the Philippines are quite magnificent. The natives do not particularly care for nuclear weapons so I guess I will have to give up on conquest.

   

I am Engaged to a Wonderful Jewish Asperger Girl (Part I)

For starters, I would like to apologize for the lack of posts this past month. Things have been happening in my life that I could not talk about with my readers. Now that things are official I am very pleased to share everything you.

This past February I received a call from my aunt. She had been telling people about me and someone had contacted her about a girl in South Pasadena named Miriam Albin.

My aunt informed me that Miriam was really smart, into anthropology, had Asperger syndrome and was quite pretty. At which point I stopped my aunt to tell her that I was already looking at a picture of this girl. As soon as I heard the name I Googled her and found her Facebook page. (Life in the twenty-first century.) Soon afterward, I received an email from Miriam. Apparently, she had Googled me in turn, found this blog and failed to be offended by its contents. So we started talking, largely through Skype. (Long distance dating in the twenty-first century.)

There was something absolutely refreshing about dating an Asperger. While we do have our differences (she likes the South Pacific and is all bubbly and friendly, while I like European history am usually found lurking in a corner contemplating taking over the world), it is amazing how similar our learned defense mechanisms are. We both fear accidentally giving offense to people over things beyond our understanding so constantly ask people whether we are bothering them or what they would like. Applying this method to another Asperger leads to some good comic exchanges:

"Is it socially appropriate for me to say this?"    
"I have no idea."
"Do you care if it is socially appropriate?"
"No."
"Oh good."

And then there are the back and forth monologues to be mediated the following way:

"Sorry for going on a random side tangent. I can stop now if you are not interested."
"Is this one of your special interests and does monologuing about this topic make you happy?"
"Yes."
"Ok as long as you do the dishes while you monologue."

Being informed that there are aspects to building a relationship that cannot be conducted over Skype, I flew out to Los Angeles in April for a weekend. I met her parents and they found me to be an Asperger, who is also responsible. Following quid pro quo logic naturally, she flew out in June to meet my family and they found Miriam to be an Asperger, who is also lovable.

The next step was for me to make this a short distance relationship so I moved out to South Pasadena. Miriam's parents liked me so much that they agreed to put me up. Miriam lives nearby in a different house. Admittedly this was an unconventional living arrangement, but I think we both gained a lot from it. We have been doing all the day to day things that a married couple does besides actually sharing a house and sleeping together. Things like preparing dinner, cleaning the dishes and figuring out whose turn it is to monologue.   

(To be continued ...)