Feeling: like an attention-whore
Listening to: still humming the Dreidel Song
Reading/Watching: nothing, I'm out of books. It is sad.

During the Hanukkah service, the rabbi's 14-month-old kept escaping his grandmother's hold and tumbling up to the bimah, climbing up the two steps to gaze in fascination at the choir, the cantor, the rabbi, just about everything.

He was the exact kind of pudgy, curly-haired Campbell's Soup Kid that makes everyone coo and grin. From the sternest man chanting from the Torah down to the softest-hearted grandma in the soprano section, he had us all looking down at him and waving and talking in silly voices and making faces.

And I'm realizing again exactly why little kids can afford to be so audacious. They still remember a time when every tiny thing they did received praise. Say "Buh!": praise. Wriggle: praise. Laugh: praise. Toddle down the middle aisle during a holy service and disrupt the sermon with chubby-kneed cuteness: praise.

But as soon as we get older and start to think too much, the thinking makes us uglier, and the praise vanishes, and we're left to depend on things like wit, personality, extensive plastic surgery, and willingness to be practically nude in public in order to garner attention. In Japan, middle-aged women do anything it takes to seem young and schoolgirlish (and thereby still interesting), from wearing pigtails to giggling and carrying annoyingly tiny plastic pink handbags.

No wonder I love to sing so much. It's like a guaranteed way to become interesting, without the embarrassing accessories.

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