Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

The above is my blogging fight song.

I went to look at an apartment in Park Slope yesterday with Cookie and Cookie Boy. The Cookies are looking to move from the Upper West Side (thank god). As we ate lunch, our conversation was hijacked by another mother of an infant, who seemed really starved for feedback about her parenting skills. So they chatted about strained carrots and whatnot while I spaced out over my hummus. I am amused the way mothers and people with dogs can talk for hours and feel totally open about starting conversations with strangers. Without the dogs or babies, though, they wouldn't say a word.

I feel strangely comforted by a couple of things: I currently live adjacent to the largest Arab community in the country, so if Something Bad were to happen, I don't think it would happen here. Further, I am not scared of small pox the way I am frightened of explosives and the thought of dying in a towering infernos. (Key word here is "thought"--it's the thought of dying rather than the experience of dying that I am afraid of). And deep down, I am not as confident as, say, the New York Post that we are going to be attacked soon. La la la. If I'm wrong, I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.