I got a note from a friend of Ronnie's in LA.  He's working on a movie and Ronnie said I might be able to help with some blogging stuff. This made me happy, because it means that Ronnie finally understands what it is I do. Then I started to talking to friend of a friend, who sent me the newest video of his comedy group. And when I pressed play, I saw a friend. Blaise Miller is from the days of the Tequila Roadhouse. When I still did stand-up comedy. Jeff Grace started at the same time as me, but clearly both kept doing comedy. Making the BIG MOVE that is necessary to actually make something of yourself.

Here is the video, Part 3 of The Googling. May I suggest you also check out Part 1 and Part 2 by The Vacationeers ?

You know how everyone claims they know a couple that met on JDate or Match.com? My rabbi says that 12 of the last 15 weddings he officiated were from JDate. I actually have friends who met and will soon be engaged and JDate was also how they met. So despite all of my negative feelings about the supermarket of Jewish dating, I bit the bullet and paid for a month membership yesterday.

Sigh.

I'm going to try and fix my attitude for the remaining 29 days, but I'm feel very down about the whole JDate thing this evening. Okay, so it isn't just JDate that has me down, but it JDate that is going to take the blame. How's that for projecting?

How Social Media Ruined Online Dating For Me

1. JDate doesn't have paragraph breaks and if I insert paragraph breaks using HTML, you would think I typed some funny letters. I find the lack of paragraph breaks maddening and then I don't read "about me" sections that are longer than 8-10 lines.

2. JDate doesn't have status updates or archive changes to profiles. It just says "Updated," but you can't see what was updated. It isn't that I don't think that people should be able to edit or tweak the language of their profiles, but I've gotten used to some sort of running commentary of moods and thoughts.

3. JDate doesn't have many places for open answers and checking [] Surfing the Web/Chatting Online doesn't really explain this whole bloggy/twitter thing I do.

4. JDate doesn't allow that ambient intimacy to form through phatic communication, not in any real way. JDate does allow for canned e-cards and flirts--but I find those to be incredibly impersonal and I won't respond.

5. I also don't IM with strangers, I know that sounds strange given how much I communicate with strangers on Twitter. But I've found that men don't keep their manners well when they are on IM with a woman they haven't met. Straight to inappropriate comments (at least in my opinion) and then we'll never meet. So it drives me crazy that men want to initiate talking via IM, when I think that is more intimate communication than email.

6. JDate only allows me to add Y/M/N (Yes, Maybe, No) or HotList a profile. Where is my tagging? Where is my note-taking? I want to be able to say "this profile is interesting b/c of this" or "note to self: you marked him a NO because of that." And then I can't sort through my Yes, Maybe, No's to see if I want to initiate contact. 

7. JDate doesn't allow me to give headlines to my photos. People pick photos that show them in Jerusalem as a not-so-subtle comment on supporting Israel. Well, two of my photos are from my last trip to Israel, but nobody can tell. But also the Uncles can't designate "not my kid" on the photos with nieces and nephews.

8. I'm not sure I have a number 8.

9. Not to mention the Jewish world in Chicago is small and the Jewish world of men who do online dating is small. So if we've already gone out or you are my friend's ex, I'd like to be able to easily block you from showing up in my results. Seriously, why do the men I mark No keep showing up?

How has Social Media changed how you use online dating? Or did it negate the need for online dating, because you met your significant other via your blog? twitter? seesmic? Or did it make you run from any sort of online dating and out into the real world? 

UPDATE: I did, at the urging of many, send this post to JDate via a contact form. The post has now been read over 300 times in one day, definitely making it one of my most popular posts ever. Nerve = struck.

For the second day in a row, I'm sporting my new shirt from the T-Shirt Deli. While I've shopped there before for others, this is my first personalized shirt for myself.  I'm a big fan of personalized shirts as gifts. I gave TokyoBoy, Rayne and Bob each a Neighborhoodie. I gave Ronnie and Henry each a shirt from T-shirt Deli.

Yesterday I wandered around Wicker Park on a in-town vacation and found myself at their doorstep. I sent out a tweet asking "Cool or lame? Getting a tshirt that says @leahjones for blogher?" Which got, be still my beating heart, an immediate response from the King of T's himself, "@leahjones it all depends on the execution , it could go either way :-)."

Some back and forths on twitter and some chatting with the friendly staff and I took the leap. I now own a geekilicious shirt with my twitter ID on it. Since @leahjones is how you'll find me most places online, it seemed appropriate. Also it guarantees that people will be able to identify me in any BlogHer photo that gets snapped in a couple weeks.

Rumor has it that BlogHer registration closed last night, so everyone knows whether or not they are going. I am going for the third year and am looking forward to meeting a lot of the women I've met on Twitter over the last year.

I was wondering if any of my lovely readers are going and who I'll get to meet this year. Will I be seeing you in San Francisco?

After years of squinting in the dark to tell if the seat was clean, stretching one arm way out in front to keep the stall door closed and sitting side-saddle because the toilet paper dispenser was in my lap, I have a few ideas about how bathrooms should be kept. I hope someone takes this into consideration when they plan how to design a public bathroom.

This is my public restroom manifesto.

1. All stalls shall have proper lighting.

Do all the mood lighting you want in the sink area. Candle light, funky chandeliers, or brutal gym lights. Really, I could care less about the sink lighting. But the stalls. I want a bright light and no shadows. See, I'm not a squatter and I'm not a toilet seat cover user or a toilet paper ad-hoc coverer, but I am a cleaner. I will take some toilet paper and clean a toilet seat that has some water from the previous flush on it.

I want to see the water that needs to be cleaned up.  I don't want a cursory look in the dim light to be turned into cursing in the dim light because I'm now wet where I shouldn't be wet. Ahem. Lighting.

2. All stalls shall have room for the door to open and an adult to step in.

Call me crazy, but I do not want to have to straddle a toilet in order to get into the stall enough to close the door. No straddling, no squeezing, no square dancing moves. I want to step in, close the stall door behind me and not have to brush up against anything. And if this is an airport bathroom, which might need a manifesto all it's own, I must be able to get my luggage into the stall with me and still not crawl all over the toilet.  

3. All locks shall lock and unlock.

I am done with the days of stretching an arm or leg out to keep a stall door closed. I am done with days of creatively hanging my purse and somehow jamming the stall door shut. And after a late night in Jerusalem, I am also done with "take your cell phone with you in case you get locked in" warnings.

A lock that closes the stall door and then easily opens, but only under my power, is all I'm asking for here. The best bet here seems to be the big sliding locks, not dinky things that need to perfectly line up. I'm also done with lifting a door with my foot to properly align the lock with the lock-hole. (that's technical jargon.) 

4. No body parts shall be touched by the toilet paper dispenser.

I have an aversion to anything other than the toilet seat touching my body when I'm on the toilet. I don't want the cabinet to touch me, I don't want the toilet paper dispenser to touch me and I sure as hell don't want the feminine hygiene trash can to touch me. Here is a little hint to the men that attach toilet paper dispenser to stall walls. 

SIT DOWN ON THE TOILET AND THEN POSITION THE TOILET PAPER DISPENSER.

I refuse to believe that if you were sitting on the toilet when you drilled those holes that you would put it where you leg naturally goes. Or so close to the ground that I have to lean over. Or so close to the door that I can barely reach it. (Which is the opposite of point four, but I'm talking LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION here.)

5. All stalls shall have ample hooks for purses and bags.

It's a bathroom. You know that right? You know what goes on in a stall on a normal day, right? Yeah. I don't want to put my purse on that floor and then take it home, where forgetting your bathroom earlier in the day, I drop my germy purse onto my kitchen counter. No. NO NO NO NO.

Give me some sturdy hooks, maybe two or three, to properly hang my belongings. Especially in a city where there is a thing called winter and sometimes I have a purse, a winter coat and a messenger bag to juggle. Give me peace of mind and let me hang my stuff up. 

6. All stalls shall have toilet paper and bathrooms shall have an emergency supply available.

I'd like to say this is a no-brainer. I'd like to say these are all no-brainers, but if they were, there would be no need for this manifesto. I have to give props to two bathrooms for the availability of emergency toilet paper. The first are the bathrooms at HUC in Jerusalem. Each had a 48 pack under the sink. The second is the Northwestern School of Law bathroom. They had a special shelf FULL of toilet paper. Learn from these universities, restrooms of the world. Ample toilet paper and back-up supplies available make for happy customers. 

7. All toilets shall flush.

I'm a homeowner and before that I worked in college housing. I am not shy about taking a toilet apart to make it flush, but I don't want to do that in a public restroom. However, I also will do everything in my power to leave the next user an empty toilet, so I will take lids off toilets, push buttons and pull strings.

Or you, owner of a public restroom, could just keep the toilet in working order. Water in, water and waste out.  

8. All floors shall be dry.

Remember what I said about setting my purse on the floor? I also don't want the hem of my pants or skirt to get wet in unidentified "God, please let this be water" on the floor. I don't want to walk in wearing my cute summer sandles or ugly crocs and get my fresh pedicure wet in what I hope is water. I also don't like walking out and leaving wet footprints behind me, leaving a trail of people wondering what I stepped in and if I realize that I'm tracking "Oh god, please let it just be water" across the restaurant. 

9. All bathrooms shall have at least one toilet that doesn't feel like it belongs in a kindergarten bathroom. 

I'm tall, but I accept that short people exist. I love some very nice short people. Everyone doesn't need a toilet that comes up to my knee, some people need toilets that come up to my shin. I don't. I want the option of a toilet that is at chair height. I don't want to need a bar above my head to pull myself up and off the toilet, rather a toilet at the appropriate height would serve me fine. 

10. Toilets shall not have those plastic slipcovers on them.

The automatic plastic slip-covers at O'Hare creep me out. CREEP ME OUT. Do I know if you waved your hand and made the thingy move? Do you know if I did? Do I know that the plastic things aren't recycled?

No, no, no, and no. (Actually, I'm pretty trusting that the industry really is one use only... but still.) I can clean off a toilet seat that is reused time and again, I can only wave my hand and hope a clean plastic sheet rolls out for me. 

11. Automatically flushing toilets shall only flush when really appropriate. 

Some toilets flush with such gusto that they cover the toilet seat with water. Thus the need for proper lighting to clean it off with. But what happens then the auto-toilet flushes, you clean it and before you can sit on the toilet it flushes again, covering the toilet seat with water, which you clean.... Finally, you get the timing right and sit before it flushes.

But then the automatically flushing toilet flushing while you are mid-business and you get the distinct feeling that some business just got flushed with gusto up onto you.

Ugh... I hate that feeling. So, automatically flushing toilets of the world, don't flush when I'm sitting on you or just after I've gotten the toilet seat clean enough to sit. How about you get tied to the stall door somehow, eh? 

*This manifesto is written by an American for primarily a Western audience. If I am somewhere that toilets don't flush or toilet paper isn't used, I'll make do.

**This was inspired by the new LA Bathroom Blog. 

***What did I miss? What is on your bathroom manifesto? 

P.S. If I need to tip someone in the bathroom, warn me, cause I feel like an asshole when I go to a bathroom and can't tip the woman giving me toilet paper or eyeshadow. 

I had one shabbat in Israel this year. Normally I try for two, but I just couldn't make it work this year, so one it was. And it was also one that I kept completely and fully in Jerusalem with my friend CK. CK is kind of Sam to my Diane without the romance. We debate and we laugh. He has wanted me to try keeping shabbat fully, so I promised him a shabbat on my summer trip.

Shabbat he got.

We started around 3PM on Friday afternoon, when he raced around the shuk buying avocados, tomatoes, soda, olives, tahini, challah, and untold bags of fresh produce. I kept trying to take a bag or two from him, but it wasn't until we picked up 8 liters of drinks that he finally let me help. We had etrog from the etrog man, tasted olives while we waited for tahini and snapped a photo of the other ROI. 

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We went back to his house that was overflowing with guests and immediately got online for the hours remaining before shabbat. Doing work, making calls, sending text messages. Around 6:45 or so, Dave pulled six candles out of the cabinet (two for each female guest to light to welcome shabbat) and by 7:30 we'd lit the candles, put on Kotel appropriate clothes, emptied our pockets and we were out the door.

First stop was the Kotel for kabbalat shabbat, which I've written a bit about. That was the night I put a note in the wall for a guy I know from twitter, Schmult. He's a reader of my work blog and recovering from some serious cancer. Every little bit helps, no?  

At the Kotel, we picked up two more travelers and started the race to Reb Chayim's house at the end of Emek Rafayim. The end. Lucky for us, I remembered how to get to Emek from when I drug Dubi to the wall last summer in the middle of the night. Lucky might not be the right word, because the easiest way to get there is to go from the Kotel to Zion Gate (Serious. Up. Hill. Climb.) then go down a switchback trail, walk past Sultan's Pools, walk UP to the Cinema and scottish church, walk UP to the gas station that is one of my major landmarks and then walk down the street. To the end. The very end.

It was a long walk.

A very long walk.

And, hey, I was observing shabbat so there was no flagging a cab or stopping to buy a bottle of water. Instead I tried to convince the South African I was walking with that Barack Obama isn't Muslim. 

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Finally we got to our dinner at Crazy Reb Chayim's apartment. From what I understand, Reb used to host dinners of 150 people in the old city, but someone convinced him that while 150 was nice, 20 was better. Reb Chayim was a shtreimel wearing rebbe and he kindly split us up by gender (men down one side of the table, women on the other) and we got down to the business of shabbat dinner.

And by get down to business, I mean we didn't eat for at least another hour. We did a round of introductions. Who are you, where are you from, and answering random trivia from Reb Chayim. Mine was the location of the best burger in Chicago. There were young men at the table who are currently studying with him, a couple that knew him, a former student from Minnesota, lots of folks from Jersey playing Jewish geography and his three young daughters running around making merry.

We made kiddush, we said the opening prayers, we lined up to wash our hands and then we finally got to eat the plates of hummus and Israeli salads in front of us. After we'd had our fill, the appetizers came out. Erm, okay, we can keep eating. After the appetizers (which, honestly, we all thought was dinner) Reb told us it was time for a round of La Chaim's. Each person would make a toast "to life" and everyone would take  a sip of schnapps or wine or another drink after each one. 20 toasts later, I said, "When it comes to a time in your life that you need healing, I hope you are blessed with the most gifted healer you can find."

To life.

Turns out Reb Chayim is a healer. Who knew? 

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After the round of toasts, Reb Chayim tells us we've come to the time in the night when we can ask him anything we want. The only exception is questions of halacha or Jewish law. He would give us opinions and not answers. 

Nobody was really asking him much, so I got up from the floor where I'd been looking at his wedding album with his 4 year old daughter. "Okay, I want to know how you met your wife."

We were treated to a 45 minute tale of crossing paths, serendipity, synchronicities, "they say you'll know," and visions.  He and his wife had an amazing tale and if you ever meet him, you should ask. After hearing the story, I realized that his wife only looked meek and my respect for her quintupled. 

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Completely full, the Reb told us it was time for the meal. He and some of his students started pulling out the pasta, the cholent, the chicken, the fish. Are you kidding me? We've already had two dinners? We protest in the way you protest at a Jewish meal and we all filled our plates again.

Other people asked questions, but I was still mulling over the story of how he met his wife. What she knew upon meeting him. What he saw upon meeting her. And how in the end everyone was right.

The one question I remember was one of the women in our group asking if she could try on his shtreimel. He said yes! And we passed it around the table. Each of the women wearing it for only a few moments and taking mental photographs of each other, but his students each wore it for 30 or 45 minutes.  

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Eventually dessert came out and we all ate again. At some point in the dinner, Reb Chayim offered us each a blessing. Mine was that I win all of my arguments this year. Not a bad blessing to receive. We said the prayers after the meal and got up to say goodbye.

As CK and I left, we finally saw a clock. We left dinner at 3:00 AM. Reb Chayim walked us all the way to the intersection and wished us well. I don't doubt that Reb has some incredible intuition, the man is tuned in to everyone's energy, no doubt. 

CK and I walked an easier way back across Jerusalem and collapsed around 4:00AM. We decided to miss going to a mutual friends kallah shabbat (shabbat before her wedding) because there was no chance we'd be waking up in time.

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The next day, CK made me the most amazing shabbat meal. A salad full of avocados, tomatoes, corn, and I don't know what else. We had tahini, sweet challah, sweet cold white wine from Gila, and sat on the balcony with our meals and our books.

When it got to hot, we both went inside and spent the rest of the day reading and napping. I kept my cell phone off, I kept my blackberry off, I kept my computer off. I napped and read and napped and read and ate and napped and read. It was a lot like my weekends in Colorado when I didn't have a computer at home or a blackberry.

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It was an amazing 25 hours or so. We topped it off with Havdalah and then turned the water heater on, got cleaned up and went out for the night. Will I start keeping shabbat now? I'm not sure, I haven't since I've been back. But do I see it is less intimidating that it seems? Yes.

Am I happy I did it? Yes, absolutely. It was meaningful, my host was generous with time and food, and the Reb was kind in a way I didn't expect shtreimel wearing men to be to a tattooed Jew. 

Who knows what happens now. I've friended the Reb on Facebook and I'll be back to Israel. But what will guarding shabbat mean to me in the future? Only time and space will tell. 

So much has happened in the last six weeks that my mind is reeling and I'm playing catch-up. I slept in super late yesterday for the first time since my first couple days in Tel Aviv and I'm camped out in my familiar Metropolis Coffee in Edgewater.

At work this week I went to a blogger meet-up with Neville Hobson while he was here for the New Media Academic Summit. I went to have cocktails at the home of Dan and Ruth Edelman, where Jesse Jackson spoke for a 15 minutes about the need to elevate the parent-teacher relationship to improve education. I was surprised how many spoke up and thanked Rev. Jackson for the profound influence he had in their lives and in how they chose career paths. At the New Media Academic Summit, I got to pretend I was somebody and hold an Olympic Torch.  

For week's I've been sitting on the not-too-secret, but not-my-news-to-tell news that Amy Guth was getting married. Now I can finally say CONGRATULATIONS!!! She spilled it on Twitter this morning that it was a Vegas Wedding with a former-Elvis officiating. I was so happy to see the news, because I'd been refreshing my interwebs since the sun went down last night waiting for the official news. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!

On Thursday night, I went dancing for the first time in ages. Dancing at the Hangge Uppe near Rush 'n' Division for hours with Edelman Colleagues. Combined with the laughing from Monday or Tuesday night that I woke up sore from, it was a much needed night of dance. For the first time in a long time, I danced without thinking about how I looked, what size I am, or how single I am. It was insane amounts of fun. So much fun that my feet (and ankles) ached for a full day afterwards. 

The week was spent immersed in Social Media. The first half I was faculty at Edelman's Summer School, teaching my specialty of search and analysis with desktop tools. The second half I was taking notes, because I'm the person writing the Edelman White Paper after the NMAS. Yikes.

I have to say that my decision about a month ago to stop talking about how overwhelmed I was feeling helped.  I let myself slow-down and enjoy my vacation. Be in the moment more often than not. But now that I'm finally at the end of a crazy six weeks, I feel like I'm in a bit of a free-fall. What now?

Shai Agassi talked about jumping off the Empire State Building and hitting balconies. His balcony is the price of oil. My balconies... I guess we'll find out, but I think they have something to do with moving across the world for a year which I'm still considering fairly seriously.