History of AOL Warez

Link to original post on rajuabju.com

Before I begin, let me state the following: This is my personal perspective of the history of Warez and the scene in general on America Online (AOL). How the scene developed in the beginnings, and where it has evolved to today. I also would like to thank Mat Stars, Reflux, and Da Chronic himself for their input and insight. Enjoy.

Well, as of writing this, I am 22 years old (it’s 2003 as of this writing). I chose to write this little piece on the history of AOL Warez (at least from my perspective) for two primary reasons. Firstly, it may sound ‘lame’ or whatever, but I’ve been involved in the scene in one form or another since I was 10 years old… so that’s 12 years and counting. For better or for worse, AOL Warez has played a part in my life, and it’s something I don’t wish to ignore or forget as I get older, so this is a good reminder document for me. Secondly, being the “wise sage” that I am, I feel it may be of benefit or interest to others to share my experiences and knowledge about the history of the scene.

To be fully honest, I don’t know or recall exactly how *I* first got involved. I know it was when I had a 2400 baud modem, and was trading old software (DOS, 16 color games, etc) through single line BBS’s, around 1991 I believe. I first began using AOL 2.0 back in 1993, when the first version of AOL for Microsoft Windows was released. Yes, I had tried AOL for DOS (back then, there was no version number) in 1991, but at that point, AOL was called Quantum Computer Services. And in case anyone is wondering why AOL has always “been so easy to use,” it’s because it was originally designed for the Macintosh and Apple II. Anyhow, at this point there were fewer than 1 million subscribers, chat service did not exist, and the scene had not yet been born. Obviously, this is also pre-unlimited use per month days (which did not occur until 1996).

With the advent of 9600 baud modems, public chat rooms, and soon the private rooms which began spawning on the AOL service. Back then, the internet was not for everyone. Only tech savvy people who knew what was going on ever logged on to the internet during this time period, and by tech savvy, I’m referring to people such as myself: young, adolescent boys, with a curiosity of technology and sense of adventure. (Yes, I consider myself the Tom Sawyer of the modern age). Anyways, enough background information, on to the creation of the scene…

Primarily through word of mouth, news spread about free programs being offered in chat rooms for trade and download. Prior to this, I had been doing BBS trading on boards such as Iniquity and Eternity. On AOL, this was first done in public chat rooms; soon of course, people migrated to private rooms, and the creation of the “warez” series of rooms. For teenage boys who wanted free software, and to be part of the “in” club, things were going great. But something was missing. Along came a man, calling himself “Da Chronic.” Now, if you don’t know of this nick name, stop reading beyond here, you don’t belong. Da Chronic, who at the time was a 17 year old high school student from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, created the first of what was to become literally thousands of programs for use on AOL, none other than “AOHell.” A fairly simple program created in Visual Basic, AOHell reached a level of popularity which has never been equaled or even rivaled (no, don’t tell me FateX was more popular, it was not). AOHell allowed people to do several basic things. Firstly, it allowed anyone, his sister, mother and dog, to create fake accounts on AOL using randomly generated information. Secondly, it had a few built in macro’s, the most popular of which was the “scrolling middle finger.” Third, you could “email bomb” or “IM bomb” people, and just be generally disruptive, which was the true intent of Da Chronic. The original version of AOHell was released around November 1994.

So at this time, AOL didn’t really do a whole lot to stop the spread of Warez on their system. I’m sure they regret this now. Had they been aggressive in the early stages of the development of the scene, I am positive that it would not have survived, just as it did not on other similar services, such as Compuserve and Prodigy. All AOL did was modify the account sign up process. Essentially, they changed the checking account creation to have some sort of validation period, and basically that was about it for a while. Of course, that didn’t stop us. Some brilliant person figured out the now infamous ‘5396’ MasterCard prefix. Simply by having the correct 4 digit CC prefix, you could still create fake accounts fairly quickly, and AOHell and similar programs automated the process for you.

The “scene” as an organized community did not establish itself until the middle of 1995, probably during the summer months. Prior to this time, such a thing as “free warez” did not exist. You traded for programs/games/utilities etc. Then along game the first known organized group, dedicated to the “free warez” concept, SHiZZa. Basically, group members from SHiZZa went around warez rooms (now being called such things as ‘cold’ or ‘thin’ ice, since the word “warez” had been banned), and recruited new members. This was taken a step further by FWA (the Free Warez Alliance, which claimed to have created the ‘freewarez’ series of private rooms, once the ‘ice’ series was also banned). Other people quickly followed suit, and created groups of their own, most notably, UPS, MySTiC, and SNT which were formed within weeks or months of SHiZZa. Groups worthy of mention who came about in the second and third waves, include Synapse and iMaGe (which iMaGe was formed via merger of Gen-X and Digital) who then later on merged to form what is now Legion, DGG (which spawned off Arise), WaY (which died off), Logic (which moved to I-Net only), and OsW (died off). I’m sure there were other groups during this time, but these are the most important and prominent ones (and the ones which I can still remember). The three dominant groups during this time were UPS, MySTiC and WaY (the latter of which, I was a part of for a few short weeks). UPSS by the way, (the AOL arm of UPS), was the first group to begin “massmailing” Warez with automated programs, and WaY took it a step further when CooLziE created IcE DroP MM’er, the first stable, fast, and fully automated MM program (it could both collect screen names from a chat room where people signed up, and then MM them all on its own).

It was also during this time when “phishing” for accounts was ever so popular. Stupid new AOL’ers just seemed to love sharing their accounts with people. At that time, it was almost too easy to steal passwords since no one made unique, hard to guess pw’s. I remember trying out passwords like sex123 and getting into accounts with ease. Of course, the other major thing which was going on was “carding.” Once you stole a person’s CC information (or more often, they ‘volunteered’ it, you could go to places such as buy.com and FedEx shit using that stolen CC info, and within a few days have a new computer, or stereo or whatever your heart desired. Now, this is a simplified explanation of how ‘phishing’ and ‘carding’ both worked, but I am not going to get into the details of those two scenes; I merely wanted to mention them because they were loosely associated with the Warez scene.

Then of course, came the crack downs in 1996. CATwatch automated sentinels were placed on AOL's warez chat channels, logging off anyone who entered. "Free" accounts were traced and nuked. Address verification systems were created to authentic all types of online transactions. AOL began warning its members of its policy of “never asking for your password or credit card.” Off the AOL scene, major release groups such as Razor 1911, Drink or Die, Inner Circle, Class, Pirates with Attitudes were targeted by authorities repeatedly. That was the “dark age” of Warez (which of course lasted only a year, but still). However, the scene would soon rebuild and be back better than ever before.

By now we are in 1997 already, and some of the ‘old school’ groups had died off, and new ones such as Arise, PaS, and Legion, (along with good ‘ol UPS) had become the dominant groups. From 1997 to 2000, I would say a good thousand groups came and went, some with a bang, others without notice. Groups I have not yet mentioned which I feel are of some worthy note include Legend, FoCuS, GoH, ink, MiRaGE. Three things to mention about this time period; first, this is the era in which every group was “allied” with one another, which basically didn’t mean a goddamn thing, except that supposedly you wouldn’t TOS another group’s member account or something. Secondly, every group had their “security” personnel, which again, didn’t mean a goddamn thing, since 99% of these groups did not have IRC chat rooms back then, and so security from what? Steve Case? I always found that funny. And third, most of these groups consisted of a President, Vice-President, and 15 members who were the President or V.P., but different screen names they used to make their group look larger; of course the majority of these groups didn’t last, hence the terms “3 month summer crew” or “2 dollar Warez group” came about. Still though, without these groups, we wouldn’t be where we are today. The final group I want to mention is Premium, whom my friend chaos helped co-found; always thought of as the “newbie” group, but over time established themselves as one of the bedrock foundations of AOL Warez.

You may be wondering why I have made no mention of “0-day Warez.” Mainly, because I was never really directly involved in that stuff and don’t have much knowledge about it. Let’s be honest, the vast majority of programs released each day are worthless pieces of crap. Who honestly gives a fuck if you are the first person to upload the newest version of a program that no one cares about? Yea, you got big balls alright… and no brains. Good fucking job bonehead. Not to rag on 0-day groups… they do an important job. But on AOL, is 0-day Warez really needed? I doubt it; in fact, I think most people would prefer a group keep a working copy of a 5 month old game on their lists instead of the newest piece of 0-day worthless software.

Another two items I have not yet mentioned were the Audio and Porn scenes on AOL. I was never heavily involved in either, but had friends who were. TuNeZ was the first major group on AOL to begin distributing music, which back then was in *.wav format since mp3’s did not yet exist. Once mp3’s began to become the dominant music format, the major group for many years on the scene was AuDiO, led by ZiGGy, and some other peoples. Other major mp3 groups of the early days included BadByz and PhreeMP3. There were plenty of other groups, and many Warez groups also had mp3 divisions for a while, but I don’t care to discuss them at length. As you might imagine, there has always been porn on AOL. Ever since I could first remember using AOL, porn has existed. The most famous, dedicated and long lasting group is none other than ESP, which has been around since 1997, and continues to spew out some great stuff even today.

Now, the biggest thing, besides the idea of free Warez on AOL, was of course, serving, instead of mass-mailing. Who exactly created the FIRST serving program, I do not know. However I know that among the very earliest was Entity for AOL 2.5 (which also worked for 2.0), by my friend BoFeN, who later went on to create the “Millennium” line of serving and mm’ing programs. After that, many of the famous early serving programs include Scream Server, Soylent Green, Ao-NiN 98 created by MemberTwo (known as the most stable server of the time), Unreal mm’er/server by eviction, and then of course BLiZzaRD by NoVa, which was the first serving program to work across multiple versions of AOL, both 16 and 32 bit. MM’ing was still important, particular inter-group MM’s. Popular MM programs I can remember were of course Turbo iCe Drop by CooLziE (the original, automated MM program for AOL 2.5), WaaS by SLaYeR, which was another one of the very early serving programs, GreeN mass mailer by everyone’s favorite coder dude, bmxer, and Krylon Cans by fin. It’s funny, as I write this, I’m thinking.. whatever happened to these guys, bmxer, fin, BoFen, NoVa… I knew all of them back in the day; wonder if they work at some software company now or something. If any of you guys should ever happen to read this, hit me up sometime goddamnit. Also, all those useful little utility progs! The 45-minute and anti-idle killers, Phantom auto-tagger, and the auto-tagger by foog, screen name reset by seven, and dead mail checker by TrU (didn’t come around until AOL began killing files off). I’m not going to even bother getting into programs like HaVoK, LuciferX, FateX, and the unlimited number of other ones which were made, I don’t consider those things to have been vital to the success of the scene at all, and most were pretty annoying.

My personal experience with the AOL scene (after leaving, and then returning during the summer of 1998) was mostly with Arise. Yes, I had created my own “3 month summer group” prior to that, which basically retagged UPS or Legion Warez. But when I joined Arise, things changed for me. It was the first time I saw the foundation of the community, based on IRC. Yes, I had used IRC previously in my BBS days, but it had changed, and a lot more people were around now. Early in 1999, I was promoted to President of Arise, and began to run the daily operations of the group with a few close ‘online friends.’ I ran things for about a year, until in early 2000 when I took a leave of absence from the group and scene in general. I returned late in the year of 2000 to find a scene which was being battered down by increased monitoring by AOL, which was now really doing whatever it could to combat Warez (and mp3/porn to a lesser degree). This is the time of killing random uploads so that a 20-part game would be unplayable since part number 19 was ‘missing.’ Groups at this time began experimenting more with things such as xDCC transfers through IRC, X-Drive’s on the internet, FTP usage en masse, all of which failed to be made available to the masses of AOL’ers who just never seem to be able to go anywhere better than a private chat room (where we ALL once started out, I remind you). By early 2002, I had once again left the group, this time for good, because of increasing demands of work and college… unfortunately, we all have to grow up at some point it seems. Of course, throughout the years, I made many good friends, and I still keep in contact with a number of them on a regular basis.

Now, the way I see it, from 1998 until about the end of 2002, there have been 4 groups which have dominated the scene with reliability. UPS, the oldest of these groups still exists today; Legion is still around, as is Arise, and of course, was Premium. Now, all four of these groups have gone through their ‘downtimes’ in which their production was minimal or nonexistent, and yet, they all survive, recruit anew, and come back strong as ever. The difference is, the backbones of these groups are always lurking around in the shadows, while other groups tend to just breakup and die whenever things become difficult on AOL, and these four groups remain focused, strategize, and proceed with plans. They are flexible to try new things, but always remain true to the purpose of their organizations: the free spread of Warez on AOL. In the past 4 or 5 years, hundreds of groups have come and gone, some lasting only weeks, others a few years, and others merging with one another. Groups from this time period which I want to give honorable mention to are Relik/React (which I believe were both born from FoCuS), Liquid, mob, and RaaO; again, I am positive there are many groups of value whom I did not include. I simply cannot remember every one of them, as there were many.

The next thing AOL did to combat Warez was limiting the amount of mail people can send out in a certain period of time. Answer to this problem? White-listing, in which you get your screen name placed on a special list which then has access to unlimited bulk email sending. No matter what tactics AOL tries to employ, they fail to realize who they are dealing with: young, adolescent boys whose passion in life it is to find ways to defeat AOL. We thrive in times of difficulty, we love the challenge, and the boasting about it to all our peers when we come out on top, it’s what we live for, and it’s in our blood. Nothing makes me happier than when I go into ‘cerver’ rooms (what they are frequently called these days), and see 2 or 3 active servers and a room full of AOL’ers requesting files like no tomorrow. As I always joke with buddies on IRC, I hope the scene exists years down the line, I surely want my son to be involved, and maybe become President of Arise or some other group, as should all of you.

When I first began writing this article in January of 2003, my original inspiration came from a similar piece I had seen on allied.org. I make no guarantee of that site still being around when YOU read this, and although it hasn’t been updated in years, it is still a site worth checking out if you have the time. Three final AOL Warez groups I wanted to mention are Infinite, Solution, and Imperial. These are 3 relatively newer groups, which have come into their own as of late. I know many members from these groups; some are ex-members from groups such as Arise or Legion. These three, along with Arise, Legion and UPS, and the dominant groups of the scene. Sadly missing from this list, you might be wondering, is Premium. Due to lack of new recruits, and increased difficulty in serving, they were forced to shut down operations. From what I have heard, a new problem has arisen lately- terminating of accounts, and shutting down the popular ‘cerver’ series of rooms. It’s just another attempt by AOL to end the Warez trade on their system, which I doubt will ever happen. Solutions to every problem always exist, some just take a while to figure out.

Well about one full year after I began this article, I decided to make an update to it, as some things have changed. It's January 2004 at this point, and I think that 1 update a year is pretty good for this page. So anyhow, things which have changed are that my old group, Arise, is no more. I was shocked and saddened to hear the news directly from EviL (the founder of Arise), that after a long, drawn out struggle to attract new members, the group had finally decided to shutter it's doors. I wish I had known about it, and I even though about calling him on the phone to bitch his ass out about giving up, but I am not much involved in the AOL scene these days and I don't see what good that would have done. Also from what I've seen and heard, most people from AOL have finally migrated to IRC when they want to obtain their Warez. It seems as though AOL has been very successful as of late in their quest to end the trading of illegal programs through their service, and although there are a few brave men who continue to serve and mm there, most have moved on to the unregulated worlds of IRC. It appears like the scene is going through another dark phase right now, as the levels of activity have dropped since I was last around, but as always, I am positive that new ways will be found, and we will refuse to be defeated as a community. See you all next year.

This history of AOL Warez is MY viewpoint on the development of the scene. I am sure I left out some important things, maybe got some facts or dates or other information wrong, and what not. And certainly, I don’t claim that it is in any way complete or final. If you remember something of IMPORTANCE which was left out (no, I don’t care about your 3 week stint in some unknown Warez group, or about the super elite hax0rish punter program you made that no one used), please feel free to contact me and let me know, or if you just want to chat about the old days.

Imus - the most sane opinion that I've read

By Shaun Powell of Newsday (an African-American journalist, to those who care about such details)

In retrospect, outraged people shouldn't have united and screamed "blank you" to Don Imus the last few days. No, instead, we should've stuck out our hand and said, "Thank you."

We should feel indebted to a shriveled, unfunny, insensitive frog for being so ignorant that he actually did us all a favor. He woke society the hell up. He grabbed it by the throat, shook hard and ordered us to take a long, critical look at ourselves and the mess we've made and ignored for much too long. He made us examine the culture and the characters we've created for ourselves, our impressionable young people and our future.

Had Imus not called a bunch of proud and innocent young women "nappy-headed hos," would we be as ashamed of what we see as we are today?

Or, to quote Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer: "Have we really lost our moral fiber?"

And our minds as well?

I'm not sure if the last few days will serve as a watershed moment for this MTV, middle-finger, screw-you generation. Probably not, according to my hunch. A short time from now, the hysteria will turn to vapor, folks will settle back into their routines, somebody will pump up the volume on the latest poison produced by hip-hop while Al Sharpton and the other racial ambulance chasers will find other guilt-ridden white folks to shake for fame and cash. In five minutes, the entire episode of Imus and his strange idea of humor will be older than his hairstyle. Lessons learned will be lessons forgotten.

I wish I were wrong about that last part. But I doubt it, because any minute now, black people will resume calling themselves bitches and hos and the N-word and in the ultimate sign of hypocrisy, neither Rutgers nor anyone else will call a news conference about that.

Because when we really get to the root of the problem, this isn't about Imus. This is about a culture we -- meaning black folks -- created and condoned and packaged for white power brokers to sell and shock jocks like Imus to exploit. Can we talk?

Tell me: Where did an old white guy like Imus learn the word "ho"?

Was that always part of his vocabulary? Or did he borrow it from Jay-Z and Dave Chappelle and Snoop Dogg?

What really disappointed me about that exhausting Rutgers news conference, which was slyly used as a recruiting pitch by Stringer, was the absence of the truth and the lack of backbone and courage. Black women had the perfect opportunity to lash out at their most dangerous oppressors -- black men -- and yet they kept the focus on a white guy.

It was a tremendous letdown for me, personally and professionally. I wanted Stringer, and especially her players, many of whom listen to rap and hip-hop, to take Nelly to task. Or BET. Or MTV. Or the gangsta culture that is suffocating our kids. They had the ear and eye of the nation trained upon them, and yet these women didn't get to the point and the root of the matter. They danced around it, and I guess I should've known better, because black people still refuse to lash out against those black people who are doing harm to us all.

Honestly, I wasn't holding my breath for Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, a pair of phony and self-appointed leaders, because they have their agendas and financial stakes. I was hoping 10 young women, who have nothing on the line, who are members of a young culture, would train their attention to within the race, name names and say enough is enough. But they didn't, and I was crushed.

You should walk around the playground and the elementary and high schools today and listen to how young black people speak to each other, treat each other and tease each other. You'd be ashamed. Next, sample some of their CDs and look at the video games they're playing. And while you're at it, blame yourself for funding this garbage, for allowing your kids to support these companies and for not taking a stand against it or the so-called artists making it happen.

Black folks, for whatever reason, can be their own worst enemy. The last several days, the media had us believe it was Don Imus. But deep down, we know better.
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Bravo! Imus made a big mistake. However, it has been abundantly clear that people such as Sharpton and Jackson have endeared themselves to this issue to further their own personal agendas. Will people really change as a result of whatever comes of this series of events? Sadly, probably not. Where has this outrage been for the countless more egregious examples of bigotry and racism in our current culture?

50 year cost of marriage?

MSN

A 50-year marriage will run you a cool $590,400. Make it count.

But first, our sources:

National Greeting Card Association
National Restaurant Association
Forbes.com
Broadway.com
CNNmoney.com
TravelDailyNews.com
Unity Marketing
Mintel
Hotelinteractive.com
American Pet Products Manufacturers Association
Planned Parenthood
National Retail Federation
National Association of Theater Owners

What You'll Give Her: Flowers
Cost in a Year: $300
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $15,000

What You'll Give Her: Cards for all the usual reasons
Cost in a Year: $21
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $1,050

What You'll Give Her: Dinners out
Cost in a Year: $2,526
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $126,300

What You'll Give Her: Expensive dinners to apologize
Cost in a Year: $700
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $35,000

What You'll Give Her: Theater, movie, concert tickets
Cost in a Year: $752
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $37,600

What You'll Give Her: Vacations
Cost in a Year: $2,913
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $145,650

What You'll Give Her: Jewelry
Cost in a Year: $1,336
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $66,800

What You'll Give Her: Lingerie
Cost in a Year: $122
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $6,100

What You'll Give Her: Trips to the spa
Cost in a Year: $275
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $13,750

What You'll Give Her: Haircuts, grooming products for you
Cost in a Year: $1,000
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $50,000

What You'll Give Her: Vasectomy after the kids are born
Cost in a Year: $1,000
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $1,000

What You'll Give Her: Caring for the dog she loves so much
Cost in a Year: $1,266
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $63,300

What You'll Give Her: Valentine's Day
Cost in a Year: $86
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $4,300

What You'll Give Her: Mother's Day
Cost in a Year: $70
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $3,500

What You'll Give Her: Holiday, anniversary, birthday gifts
Cost in a Year: $421
Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $21,050

TOTAL Cost in a Year: $12,788
TOTAL Cost Over a 50-Year Marriage: $590,400

Achieving girls

NYTimes

April 1, 2007
For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too
By SARA RIMER

NEWTON, Mass., March 31 — To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn’t measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.

“First of all, I’m a terrible athlete,” she said over lunch one day.

“I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly,” she continued. “This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.”

Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?

“Or,” said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, “do you just have it all already?”

They both burst out laughing.

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns.) Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.

But being an amazing girl often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.

An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn’t. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive tense in Catullus and on Kierkegaard’s existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North’s top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé. For Esther, as for high school seniors everywhere, this is a big weekend for finding out how your résumé measured up: The college acceptances, and rejections, are rolling in.

“You want to achieve,” Esther said. “But how do you achieve and still be genuine?”

If it all seems overwhelming at times, then the multitasking adults in Newton have the answer: Balance. Strive for balance.

But balance is out the window when you’re a high-achieving senior in the home stretch of the race for which all the years of achieving and the disciplined focusing on the future have been preparing you. These students are aware that because more girls apply to college than boys, amid concerns about gender balance, boys may have an edge at some small selective colleges.

“You’re supposed to have all these extracurriculars, to play sports and do theater,” said another of Esther’s 17-year-old classmates, Julie Mhlaba, who aspires to medical school and juggles three Advanced Placement classes, gospel choir and a part-time job as a waitress. “You’re supposed to do well in your classes and still have time to go out.”

“You’re supposed to do all these things,” Julie said, “and not go insane.”

Stress Trumps Relaxation

Newton, which has a population of almost 84,000, is known for a liberal sensibility and a high concentration of professionals like doctors, lawyers and academics. Six miles west of Boston, with its heavily settled neighborhoods, bustling downtowns and high numbers of immigrants, Newton is a suburb with an urban feel.

The main shopping area, in Newton Centre, is a concrete manifestation of the conflicting messages Esther and the other girls are constantly struggling to decode. In one five-block stretch are two Starbucks and one Peets Coffee & Tea, several psychotherapists’ offices, three SAT test-prep services, two after-school math programs, and three yoga studios promising relaxation and inner peace.

Smack in the middle of all of this is Esther’s church, the 227-year-old First Baptist, which welcomes everyone regardless of race, sexual orientation or denomination, and where Esther puts in a lot of time.

The test-prep business is booming. Kaplan (“Be the ideal college applicant!”) is practically around the corner from Chyten (“Our average SAT II score across all subjects is 720!”), which is three blocks from Princeton Review (“We’re all about scoring more!”). My First Yoga (for children 3 and up), with its founder playing up her Harvard degree, is conveniently located above Chyten, which includes the SAT Cafe.

High-priced SAT prep has become almost routine at schools like Newton North. Not to hire the extra help is practically an act of rebellion.

“I think it’s unfair,” Esther said, explaining why she decided against an SAT tutor, though she worried about her score (ultimately getting, as she put it, “above 2000”). “Why do I deserve this leg up?”

Parents view Newton’s expensive real estate — the median house price in 2006 was $730,000 — and high taxes as the price of admission to the prized public schools. There are less affluent parents, small-business owners, carpenters, plumbers, social workers and high school guidance counselors, but many of these families arrived decades ago when it was possible to buy a nice two-story Colonial for $150,000 or less.

Newton North, one of two outstanding public high schools here, is known for its academic rigor, but also its vocational education, reflecting the wide range of its 1,967 students. Nearly 73 percent of them are white, 7.3 percent black, nearly 12 percent Asian and 7.5 percent Hispanic. Many of the black and Hispanic students live in the Roxbury and Dorchester neighborhoods of Boston, and are bused in under a 35-year-old voluntary integration program.

Newton North has a student theater, winning athletic teams and dozens of after-school clubs (ultimate Frisbee, mock trial, black leadership, Hispanic culture, Israeli dance). There is an emphasis on nonconformity — even if it is often conformity dressed up as nonconformity — and an absence of such high school conventions as, say, homecoming queens, valedictorians and class rankings.

‘Superhuman’ Resistance

Jennifer Price, the Newton North principal, said she and her faculty emphasized to students that they could win admission to many excellent colleges without organizing their entire lives around résumé building. By age 14, Ms. Price said, the school’s highest fliers are already worrying about marketing themselves to colleges: “You almost have to be superhuman to resist the pressure.”

If more students aren’t listening to the message that they can relax a bit, one reason may be that a lot of the people delivering the message went to the elite colleges. Ms. Price has an undergraduate degree from Princeton — she makes a point of saying that she got in because she was recruited to play varsity field hockey — and is a doctoral candidate at Harvard. Many of the teachers have degrees from the Ivy League and other elite schools.

But the message also tends to get drowned out when parents bump into each other at Whole Foods and share news about whose son or daughter just got accepted (or not) at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Penn or Stanford.

Or when the final edition of the award-winning student newspaper, the Newtonite, comes out every June, with its two-page spread listing all the seniors, and their colleges. For that entire week, Esther says, everyone pores over the names, obsessing about who is going where.

“In a lot of ways, it’s all about that one week,” she said.

There is something about the lives these girls lead — their jam-packed schedules, the amped-up multitasking, the focus on a narrow group of the nation’s most selective colleges — that speaks of a profound anxiety in the young people, but perhaps even more so in their parents, about the ability of the next generation to afford to raise their families in a place like Newton.

Admission to a brand-name college is viewed by many parents, and their children, as holding the best promise of professional success and economic well-being in an increasingly competitive world.

“It’s, like, a really big deal to go into a lucrative profession so that you can provide for your kids, and they can grow up in a place like the place where you grew up,” Kat said.

Esther, however, is aiming for a decidedly nonlucrative profession. Inspired by her father, Greg Mobley, who is a Biblical scholar, she wants to be a theologian.

She says she is interested in “Scripture, the Bible, the development of organized religion, thinking about all this, writing about all this, teaching about all this.” More than anything else, she wrote in an e-mail message, she wants to be a writer, “and religion is what I most like to write about.”

“I have such a strong sense of being supported by my faith,” she continued. “It gives me priorities. That’s why I’m not concerned about making money, because I know that there is so much more to living a rich life than having money.”

First Baptist Church counts on Esther. She organizes pancake suppers, tutors a young congregant and helps lead the youth group’s outreach to the poor.

On a springlike Sunday afternoon toward the end of winter, Esther could be found with her father, her two brothers and members of her youth group handing out food to homeless people on Boston Common. She had spent the morning in church.

About 2 p.m., a text message flashed across her cellphone from Gabe Gladstone, a co-captain of mock trial: “Where are you?” Esther, a key member of the group, was needed at a meeting.

Esther messaged back: “I’m feeding the homeless, I’ll come when God’s work is done.”

Fending Off ‘Anorexia of the Soul’

On a Saturday afternoon in late November, Esther and her mother, Page Kelley, sat at the dining room table talking about the contradictions and complexities of life in Newton. Esther’s father was with his sons, Gregory, 15, who plays varsity basketball for Newton North, and Tommy, 10, coaching Tommy’s basketball team.

Ms. Kelley, 47, an assistant federal public defender, and Mr. Mobley, 49, a professor at Andover Newton Theological School in Newton, grew up in Kentucky and came north for college. Ms. Kelley is a graduate of Smith College and Harvard Law School. Mr. Mobley has two graduate degrees from Harvard.

Amid all the competitiveness and consumerism, and the obsession with achievement in Newton, Ms. Kelley said, “You just hope your child doesn’t have anorexia of the soul.”

“It’s the idea that you end up with this strange drive,” she continued. “One of the great things about Esther is that she does have some kind of spiritual life. You just hope your kid has good priorities. We keep saying to her: ‘The name of the college you go to doesn’t matter. There are a lot of good colleges out there.’ ”

Esther said her mother is her role model. “I think the work she does is very noble,” she said.

“She has these impressive degrees,” Esther said, “and she chooses to do something where she’s not making as much money as she could.”

As close as mother and daughter are, there is one important generational divide. “My mother applied to one college,” Esther said. “She got in, she went.”

Back from basketball practice with his sons, Mr. Mobley joined the conversation. To Mr. Mobley, a formalized, competitive culture pervades everything from youth sports to getting into college. He pointed out to his wife that the lives of their three children were far more directed “than any of the aimless hours I spent in my youth daydreaming and meandering.”

Ms. Kelley asked, “Is that because of us?”

“Yes — and no,” he said. “It’s because of 2006 in America, and the Northeast.”

The bar for achievement keeps being raised for each generation, he said: “Our children start where we finished.”

As the afternoon turned into early evening, Esther went out to meet her best friend, Aliza Edelstein. The family dog, a Jack Russell terrier named Bandit, was underfoot, trolling for affection.

“I’m not worried about Esther because I know her,” Mr. Mobley said. “Esther’s character is sealed in some fundamental way.”

Ms. Kelley, however, wondered aloud: “Don’t you worry that she never rebelled? When I was growing up, you were supposed to rebel.”

But she acknowledged that she had sent her own mixed signals. “As I’m sitting here saying I don’t care what kind of grades she gets, I’m thinking, she comes home with a B, and I say: ‘What’d you get a B for? Who gave you a B? I’m going to talk to them.’

“You do want your child to do well.”

Mr. Mobley nodded. “We’re not above it,” he said. “It’s complicated.”

On a Fierce Mission to Shine

To sit in on classes with Esther in her vibrant high school where, between classes, the central corridor, called Main Street, is a bustling social hub, is to see why these students are genuinely excited about school.

Their teachers are pushing them to wrestle with big questions: What is truth? What does Virgil’s “Aeneid” tell us about destiny and individual happiness? How does DNA work? How is the global economy reshaping the world (subtext: you have to be fluid and highly educated to survive in the new economy)?

Esther’s ethics teacher, Joel Greifinger, spent considerable time this winter on moral theories. An examination of John Rawls’s theory of justice led to extensive discussions about American society and class inequality. Among the reading material Mr. Greifinger presented was research showing the correlation between income and SAT scores.

The class strengthened Esther’s earlier decision not to take private SAT prep.

In her honors philosophy/literature class, Esther has been reading Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, “Sophie’s Choice” and Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Amid a discussion of the strangely unsettling emptiness Frankl encountered upon his release from a Nazi concentration camp, Esther quoted Sartre: “You are condemned to freedom.”

Her honors teacher, Mike Fieleke, nodded. “That’s the existential idea. If we don’t awaken to that freedom, then we are slaves to our fate.”

A few weeks earlier, Esther, taking stock of her own life, wrote in an e-mail message: “I feel like I’m on the verge. I feel like I’m just about to get out of high school, to enter into adulthood, to reach some kind of state of independence and peacefulness and enlightenment.”

More immediately, she wrote, Mr. Fieleke had told her “he thought, from reading my papers and hearing me speak in class, that I was just on the verge of some really great idea.”

“I asked him if he thought that idea would come by next Wednesday, when our big Hamlet paper was due. He said I might feel this way all year long.”

The most intensely pressurized academic force field at school is the one surrounding the students on the Advanced Placement and honors track. About 145 of the 500 seniors are taking a combined total of three, four and five Advanced Placement and honors classes, with a few students even juggling six and seven.

Esther’s friend Colby takes four Advanced Placement and one honors class. “I’m living up to my own expectations,” Colby said. “It’s what I want to do. I want to do well for myself.”

Another of Esther’s friends, from student theater, Lee Gerstenhaber, 17, was juggling four Advanced Placement classes with intense late-night rehearsals for her starring role as Maggie, the seductive Southern belle in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” It was too much. About 4 a.m one day last fall, she was still fighting her way through Advanced Placement physics homework. She dissolved in tears.

“I had always been able to do it before,” Lee recalled later. “But I finally said to myself, ‘O.K., I’m not Superwoman.’ ”

She dropped physics — and was incandescent as Maggie.

Esther’s schedule includes two Advanced Placement and one honors class. Among certain of her classmates who are mindful that many elite colleges advise prospective applicants to pursue the most rigorous possible course of study, taking two Advanced Placement classes is viewed as “only two A.P.’s.” But Esther says she is simply taking the subjects she is most interested in.

She also shrugged off advice that it would look better on her résumé to take another science class instead of her passion, A.P. Latin. Like so many of her classmates, Esther started taking Latin in the seventh grade, when everyone was saying Latin would help them with the SAT. But now, except for Esther and a handful of other diehards who are devoted to Latin — and to their teacher, Robert Mitchell — everyone else has moved on.

“I like languages,” said Esther, who also takes Advanced Placement Spanish. “And I really like Latin.”

Who Needs a Boyfriend?

This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’ ” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better.”

Esther turned to Colby: she seems to pretty much always have a boyfriend.

“I never felt like having a boyfriend was a burden,” Colby said. “I enjoy just being comfortable with someone, being able to spend time together. I don’t think that means I wouldn’t feel comfortable or confident without one.”

Esther said: “I’m not trying to say that’s a bad thing. I’m like you. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ ”

But who needs a boyfriend? “My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends,” Esther wrote in an e-mail message. “I mean, girlfriends last longer.”

Boyfriends or not, a deeper question for Esther and Colby is how they negotiate their identities as young women. They have grown up watching their mothers, and their friends’ mothers, juggle family and career. They take it for granted that they will be able to carve out similar paths, even if it doesn’t look easy from their vantage point.

They say they want to be both feminine and assertive, like their mothers. But Colby made the point at lunch that she would rather be considered too assertive and less conventionally feminine than “be totally passive and a bystander in my life.”

Esther agreed. She said she admired Cristina, the spunky resident on “Grey’s Anatomy,” one of her favorite TV shows.

“She really stands up for herself and knows who she is, which I aspire to,” Esther said.

Cristina is also “gorgeous,” Esther laughed. “And when she’s taking off her scrubs, she’s always wearing cute lingerie.”

Speaking of lingerie, part of being feminine is feeling good about how you look. Esther is not trying to be one of Newton North’s trendsetters, the girls who show up every day in Ugg boots, designer jeans — or equally cool jeans from the vintage store — and tight-fitting tank tops under the latest North Face jacket.

She never looks “scrubby,” to use the slang for being a slob, but sometimes comes to school in sweats and moccasins.

“I think sometimes I might be trying a little too hard not to conform,” Esther says.

She says she is one of the few girls in her circle who doesn’t have a credit card. But she is hardly immune to the pressure to be a good consumer.

During the discussion around the dining room table, Esther’s mother expressed her astonishment over her daughter’s expertise in designer jeans. They had been people-watching at the mall. Esther, as it turned out, knew the brand of every pair of jeans that went by.

So what were the coolest jeans at Newton North?

“The coolest jeans are True Religions,” Esther said.

“They look,” she said, and here she smiled sheepishly as she stood up to reveal her denim-clad legs, “like these.”

Aliza and several of Esther’s other friends chipped in to buy them for her 17th birthday, in November.

Encouraged to Ease Up a Little

The amazing boys say they admire girls like Esther and Colby.

“I hate it when girls dumb themselves down,” Gabe Gladstone, the co-captain of mock trial, was saying one morning to the other captain, Cameron Ferrey.

Cameron said he felt the same way.

One of Esther’s close friends is Dan Catomeris, a school theater star. “One of the most attractive things about Esther is how smart she is,” said Dan, whose mother is a professor at Harvard Business School. “There’s always been this intellectual tension between us. I see why she likes Kierkegaard — he’s existential, but still Christian. She really likes Descartes. I was not so into Descartes. I really like Hume, Nietzsche, the existentialist authors. The musician we’re most collectively into is Bob Dylan.”

Sometimes, though, everybody wants some of these hard-charging girls to chill out. Tom DePeter, an Advanced Placement English teacher, wants his students to loosen up so they can write original sentences. The theater director, Adam Brown, wants the girls to “let go” in auditions.

Peter Martin, the girls’ cross-country coach, says girls try so hard to please everyone — coaches, teachers, parents — that he bends over backward not to criticize them. “I tell them, ‘Just go out and run.’ ” His team wins consistently.

But how do you chill out and still get into a highly selective college?

One of Esther’s favorite rituals is to hang out at her house with Aliza, eating Ben and Jerry’s and watching a DVD of a favorite program like “The Office.” Their friendship helped Esther and Aliza keep going last fall, when there was hardly time to hang out. Esther recalled in an e-mail message how one night she had telephoned Aliza, who is also a top student, and a cross-country team captain, to say she was feeling overwhelmed.

“I said, ‘Aliza, this is crazy, I have so much homework to do, and I won’t be able to relax until I do it all. I haven’t gone out in weeks!’ And Aliza (who had also been staying in on Fridays and Saturdays to do homework) pointed out: ‘I’d rather get into college.’ ”

By Dec. 15, Newton North was in a frenzy over early admissions answers. Esther’s friend Phoebe Gardener had been accepted to Dartmouth. Her friend Dan Lurie was in at Brown. Harvard wanted Dan Catomeris.

Esther was in calculus class, the last period of the day when her cellphone rang. It was her father. The letter from Williams College — her ideal of the small, liberal arts school — had arrived.

Her father would be at her brother’s basketball game when she got home. Her mother would still be at the office. Esther did not want to be alone when she opened the letter.

“Dad, can you bring it to school?” she asked.

Ten minutes later, when her father arrived, Esther realized that he had somehow not registered the devastating thinness of the envelope. The admissions office was sorry. Williams had had a record number of highly qualified applicants for early admission this year. Esther had been rejected. Not deferred. Rejected.

Her father hugged her as she cried outside her classroom, and then he drove her home.

Esther said several days later: “Maybe it hurt me that I wasn’t an athlete.”

But she was already moving on. “I chose Williams,” she said, with a shrug. “They didn’t choose me back.”

About that thin envelope: Mr. Mobley, unschooled in such intricacies, said he hadn’t paid much attention to it. He had wanted so much for his daughter to get into Williams, he said, and believed so strongly in her, that it was as if he had wished the letter into being an acceptance.

“It was a setback,” Mr. Mobley said weeks later. “But it’s not a failure.”

And Then One Day, a Letter Arrives

Has this all been a temporary insanity?

Esther’s friend Colby learned in February that she had been accepted at the University of Southern California. Soon, more letters of acceptance rolled in: from the University of Miami, the University of Texas at Austin, Tulane. With the college-application pressure behind her, she can go back to being the pragmatic romantic who opened her journal last August and wrote her “life list,” with 35 goals and dreams, in pink ink.

She wants: To write a novel. Own a (red) Jeep Wrangler. Get into college. Name her firstborn daughter Carmen. Go to carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Learn to surf. Live in a Spanish-speaking country. Learn to play the doppio movimiento of Chopin’s Sonata in B Flat. Own a dog. Be a bridesmaid. Vote for president. Write a really good poem. Never get divorced.

In mid-January Esther was thrilled to receive an acceptance letter from Centre College, one of her fallback schools, in Kentucky. But she was still dreaming about her remaining top choices: Amherst, Middlebury, Davidson and Smith, her mother’s alma mater.

Esther’s application to Smith included a letter from her father. He wrote about how, when Esther was a baby, they had gone to his wife’s 10th college reunion. He described the alumni parade as an “angelic procession of women in white, decade by decade, at every stage in the course of human life.”

He wrote about seeing the young women, the middle-aged graduates and, finally, “the elderly women, some with the assistance of canes and wheelchairs, but with no diminution of the confidence that a great education brings.”

“I still remember holding Esther as we watched those saints go marching into the central campus for the commencement ceremony,” he wrote.

“Lord,” he concluded, and he could have been talking about any of the schools his daughter still has her heart set on, “I want Esther to be in that number.”

Epilogue: Esther learned last week that she had gotten into Smith. She learned on Saturday that she had been rejected by Amherst and Middlebury. She is still hoping for Davidson.

It’s Not You, It’s Your Apartment

NYTimes

March 29, 2007
It’s Not You, It’s Your Apartment
By JOYCE WADLER

DATING is fraught with disappointments, so you can imagine how delighted a single woman might be to find someone like Albert Podell — particularly after she Googles him and learns how rich he is. Last year, Mr. Podell, a 70-year-old lawyer, gave N.Y.U. Law School $2.9 million. He goes out four nights a week, to the opera, symphony or theater. He is well read. He says he has traveled to 162 countries.

Then comes that magic evening when the woman is ready to go back to his place.

“It’s totally unchanged, like it was when I went to law school in 1973, a time warp,” Mr. Podell says of his small one-bedroom in SoHo, a description that seems plausible, given the hot pink living room with the futon seating and the fraying contact paper on the kitchen cabinets.

The place is also dimly lighted, which, once you examine the kitchen nook in daylight, is probably not such a bad thing. The cabinets hold nothing but a six-month supply of powdered milk for Mr. Podell’s cereal, so that he can keep his trips to the supermarket to a minimum; the Formica countertop is peeling; the stove has been disconnected from the gas feed. (Mr. Podell, who usually eats out, sees no reason to waste fuel.)

All these things have proved detriments to love, but none so effectively as his sheets. Mr. Podell likes the ones from the ’60s and ’70s that tell a story: sheets with intergalactic battles or pink hippopotami or the Beatles. Since these are no longer available in adult-bed sizes, Mr. Podell’s sheets are now 30 to 40 years old. The fading is such that a person who saw one in a Salvation Army bin, having lost everything she owned in a fire, would remind herself that there was no reason to be desperate. The fading, however, was apparently not the reason that the sheets became a deal breaker.

“I was dating this very nice woman, I thought,” says Mr. Podell. “I was ready and she was ready to do the big deed. I take her to my apartment, go into the bedroom, and fling back the sheets, and she said, ‘My husband had these sheets and he was a mean-hearted son of a bitch and you must be like him and I’m leaving.’ ”

Spring is here and the restaurants will soon be filled with anxious and hopeful couples, ordering wine, dusting off their most luminous lies, thinking they might finally have found love. Then they will see their dates’ homes for the first time. And suddenly some of them will realize that they cannot be with this person a moment longer — or at the very latest, because that wine was not cheap, beyond the next morning. A few whose homes have been romantic deal breakers may, like Mr. Podell, know what went wrong and choose to ignore it, seeing their apartments as a reflection of their brave refusal to bow to conventional taste.

“There have been at least 40 women who’ve said, why do you live here?” he says.

Make that 41. Why does he live here?

“Ever hear the words ‘rent stabilized’?” says Mr. Podell, who’s paying $702 for a one bedroom in SoHo. “What do I need a fancy place for? A lot of people want to show off their wealth. It ain’t me, baby.”

Then there is Bob Strauss, 46, who writes dating advice for match.com and has a real stuffed baby seal in his apartment. He didn’t whack the seal on its silky little head, it’s a family piece inherited from a rich aunt and uncle in Miami.

It is displayed along with Mr. Strauss’s South Park and Sonic the Hedgehog figurines and Lego collection.

“It’s provocative,” he adds. “I like going out with tough, smart, aggressive, challenging type people. It’s fine with me if they want to argue about it; I don’t want to blandify my apartment to make myself generically acceptable.”

Most people, however, will never know how their homes sabotaged their romance. They operate under the assumption that if the garbage has been discarded and the dog hair removed, the house is romance-ready. They are unaware that such seemingly insignificant details as a Klimt poster or harsh overhead lighting are proof to some that they are not dateworthy. For these poor innocents, a guide.

No Stuffed Animals, Even If You Are Dying

Alison Forbes, a founder of The Art of Everyday Living consulting service in Los Angeles, is often called upon to help make homes relationship-ready. It was her sorry duty to inform us that the stuffed animal pandemic continues. She believes it may show a reluctance to grow up — or, in cases where the stuffed animals cover the bed, a reluctance to make space for another person.

Jason Bunin, the 36-year-old bad-boy chef at the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill in Greenwich Village, echoed her disapproval.

“You see it more in younger girls, like between 21 and 25,” Mr. Bunin says. “Pink, purple, teddy bears, unicorns, all over the bed. I’d just whack ’em off with my arm.”

Why do men dislike stuffed animals?

“Too cutesy and immature.” Also, Mr. Bunin says, if you were to get involved with someone like that, you’d have that garbage in your house.

Mr. Bunin, by the way, is on the dating scene no more. He married Caron Newman earlier this month in an Elvis-themed wedding in Las Vegas. You can check out the video at cupidswedding.com. Mr. Bunin is the one in the black sequined tuxedo.

There Is a Reason Nice Buildings Are Not Named for Norman Bates

Sure, you can save money by moving into your mother’s house, but as always in matters of romance, you must first ask yourself: Would James Bond do it?

If you are still thinking about the answer, consider the experience of Adria Armbrister, a 30-year-old program coordinator at Columbia University’s School of Public Health. Ms. Armbrister met a man online through Yahoo and after a month and a half of e-mailing they had dinner. It went well: The man, who was 29, owned a business, he did not ask Ms. Armbrister to pay for her own meal or try to borrow money. On the second date, they stopped by his house to pick up an umbrella. The house had belonged to his mother, who had died five years earlier. The plastic-covered gold sofas and the heavy gold tasseled lamps suggested to Ms. Armbrister that her date had not redecorated — never a sign of an enterprising personality. But the deal breaker came when she saw his room.

“We walked up three flights of stars to the attic,” she says. “It looked like a teenager’s room. The computer was up there and the twin bed, his clothes were all over the floor. I was like, uuuuuh-huuuuh. He didn’t even seem sorry that he lived in a 12-year-old boy’s room, this was like normal behavior. It said to me, this person is not grown up yet. It was frightening. He’s lived his whole life in the attic.”

What did her date do for a living?

“He was in the real estate business.”

The Word “Ex” May Be Substituted for the Word “Mother”

It is also a detriment to romance when one’s date shares a roof with a former spouse.

“I met him at a function,” says a woman who is a lawyer in Manhattan and has been divorced for several years. She would speak only on condition of anonymity. “It was like” — and here she sings — “across a crowded room. He was very upfront about his living arrangement. He said he and his wife had one of those huge Upper West Side apartments with four bedrooms. She lived in one, another couple lived in another one, whoever was in need of a home is in the third one. Every morning, they go to the kitchen and have coffee together. I couldn’t picture myself in that scenario. It was like Frasier and Niles with that father and Daphne. He was very cute, but then I realized he was totally unsuccessful.”

Although the Stasi Were Said to Love It

“I can’t sit in a room with overhead lighting,” says Michele Slung, a freelance book editor in Woodstock, N.Y. “It makes me feel like I’m in a police interrogation room. I believe in lamps that are casting warm glows, and anyone that doesn’t understand that, I can’t be in their house, men or women. It’s a matter of warmth; it makes people happy.”

Ms. Slung insists on pink light bulbs, her preferred shade being Dawn Pink. She also uses amber lampshades.

“I don’t think I could ever like somebody who got their lighting wrong,” she says. “What this probably means is that I’m not in the market for a guy. If I ever found a guy with a beautifully lit house I would propose — although probably his wife would have done the lighting.”

In the Afterglow of Love, Nobody Ever Reaches for a Hammer

Michael Longacre is a New York graphic designer. He believes that design people are aesthetically demanding, but in the case of one brief affair, the problem was a more basic sort. “This was a great looking guy, who worked on Wall Street,” Mr. Longacre says. “He wore like $2,000 suits, but his great pride was really, really expensive shoes. He told me he had 50 or 60 pairs of these Italian shoes that are $750 a pair. I go to his apartment, there was no framing on the doors, there were like test colors on the walls. He’d started work on it several years earlier. I said, ‘You’ve spent $30,000 on shoes, but you’re gonna renovate your own apartment when you get around to it?’ He also showed me his waterless bong. Having high-tech marijuana equipment is another deal breaker for me.”

We Aren’t Kidding About the Klimt

Adam Handler, who is 35, lives in Atlanta where he does grass-roots organizing for CARE. He is now married. But five or six years ago, when he was single and living in Washington, D.C., a nascent relationship was destroyed when a woman he’d been dating invited him back to her apartment.

“On her walls she had my two most despised pieces of art,” Mr. Handler says. One was “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt. “I happen to hate Klimt, but ‘The Kiss’ is the most trite and overdone and what made it worse, it was in her bedroom. Then there was the Robert Doisneau photograph of this couple kissing.”

That black and white photo taken on a Paris street in the ’50s? That’s kind of romantic.

“It’s romantic when you’re 16,” Mr. Handler says. “At some point you need to outgrow it.”

The romance, while it did not end that evening, ended soon after.

“She was attractive, she was smart, she was all the things I thought I would have liked in a woman, but I decided I didn’t trust her judgment,” Mr. Handler says.

What was his wife’s place like when they met?

It was a studio in Manhattan, Mr. Handler says, with a few really nice antiques. She also had a very impressive set of Le Creuset cookware. He had just about the same amount of All-Clad. It worked.

A Touch of Raffia Might Have Helped. But We Doubt It

Evan Lobel knows how to put together a welcoming apartment — in addition to being the owner of Lobel Modern, a vintage furniture store in lower Manhattan, he’s a designer. But even that doesn’t guarantee success.

“I was dating somebody very seriously,” says Mr. Lobel, who is 42. “He went away for a year to work in the Peace Corps. The two of us were in love. I said, I’m gonna wait, I’m not gonna be with anyone else, and I lived up to that. When he came back, we were supposed to live together. I thought, wouldn’t it be a nice surprise, after a year of living in huts, to live in a nice big, beautiful apartment.”

While his boyfriend was posted in Swaziland, Mr. Lobel sold his 1,200-square-foot Chelsea apartment and bought a 2,500-square-foot loft, with a fireplace and stone bathrooms. It was a frightening financial leap. While his old apartment sold for $1.5 million, the new one cost almost $2.4 million. He brought in beautiful pieces: a cabinet by the midcentury designer Tommi Parzinger; a Karl Springer chandelier with an estimated value of $25,000.

Then his boyfriend returned.

“He said, ‘What is this? I can’t live in a place like this, I was just around people who were hungry and dying,’” Mr. Lobel says. “In the end we were breaking up. For a while I regretted even buying that apartment.”

It’s Not My Place, It’s You

Matt Heindl, who is 34 and does Internet marketing, remembers two terrible dating experiences. The first involved a woman who was a nail biter — he discovered this in the cold light of morning when he found bits of her nails on the bedside stand. He also has a vivid memory of the mildewed towel she offered when he took a shower.

“It kind of smelled like dog,” he says, with a tone of disgust. “I can smell it now.”

The second experience involved an artist who lived in an East Village tenement. As he entered her apartment, a free-flying parrot relieved itself on his head. Then a large rabbit darted out from somewhere and licked his feet. A baby gate separated a second rabbit from the first — there had been a nasty penis-biting episode, his date explained. Also, the kitchen wall was covered with antique egg beaters, which looked to Mr. Heindl like weird tools.

Mr. Heindl and his date, Breck Hostetter, have now been married two years, and have a 9-month-old daughter, Greta. She operates Sesame Letterpress out of their home in Carroll Gardens. It is named, Ms. Hostetter says, after a parakeet who passed away at age 12.

Can Mr. Heindl explain how a deal breaker turned into marriage?

“I seriously thought, ‘Shall I run? No, I like her, I like her, I’ll check it out,’ ” he says. “I thought about it, I asked myself, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and I decided it showed she can really nurture, because one was like a really old rabbit, a geriatric rabbit. And she baked, obviously.”

So there it is — if your date doesn’t get your rabbit or your seal or your light bulb, he or she is not the person for you. Mr. Handler, the Klimt hater, now believes he was probably looking for a reason to break up with the woman he was seeing because she wasn’t right for him.

Mr. Podell, of the cartoon animal sheets, proudly fills a page with the household complaints of his dates. They include the size of his apartment, the lack of a coffeepot, the nonexistent stove connection, the lack of closet space. His love life, however, is great. He has a 22-year-old Russian girlfriend, whom he met in Malta. They have taken vacations to Asia, Europe and India, with Mr. Podell footing the bill.

Mr. Podell’s girlfriend lives in Moscow.

She has never seen his apartment.

Huntington's Disease -- Knowing and Future Planning

NYTimes

March 18, 2007
Facing Life With a Lethal Gene
By AMY HARMON

The test, the counselor said, had come back positive.

Katharine Moser inhaled sharply. She thought she was as ready as anyone could be to face her genetic destiny. She had attended a genetic counseling session and visited a psychiatrist, as required by the clinic. She had undergone the recommended neurological exam. And yet, she realized in that moment, she had never expected to hear those words.

“What do I do now?” Ms. Moser asked.

“What do you want to do?” the counselor replied.

“Cry,” she said quietly.

Her best friend, Colleen Elio, seated next to her, had already begun.

Ms. Moser was 23. It had taken her months to convince the clinic at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan that she wanted, at such a young age, to find out whether she carried the gene for Huntington’s disease.

Huntington’s, the incurable brain disorder that possessed her grandfather’s body and ravaged his mind for three decades, typically strikes in middle age. But most young adults who know the disease runs in their family have avoided the DNA test that can tell whether they will get it, preferring the torture — and hope — of not knowing.

Ms. Moser is part of a vanguard of people at risk for Huntington’s who are choosing to learn early what their future holds. Facing their genetic heritage, they say, will help them decide how to live their lives.

Yet even as a raft of new DNA tests are revealing predispositions to all kinds of conditions, including breast cancer, depression and dementia, little is known about what it is like to live with such knowledge.

“What runs in your own family, and would you want to know?” said Nancy Wexler, a neuropsychologist at Columbia and the president of the Hereditary Disease Foundation, which has pioneered Huntington’s research. “Soon everyone is going to have an option like this. You make the decision to test, you have to live with the consequences.”

On that drizzly spring morning two years ago, Ms. Moser was feeling her way, with perhaps the most definitive and disturbing verdict genetic testing has to offer. Anyone who carries the gene will inevitably develop Huntington’s.

She fought her tears. She tried for humor.

Don’t let yourself get too thin, said the clinic’s social worker. Not a problem, Ms. Moser responded, gesturing to her curvy frame. No more than two drinks at a time. Perhaps, Ms. Moser suggested to Ms. Elio, she meant one in each hand.

Then came anger.

“Why me?” she remembers thinking, in a refrain she found hard to shake in the coming months. “I’m the good one. It’s not like I’m sick because I have emphysema from smoking or I did something dangerous.”

The gene that will kill Ms. Moser sits on the short arm of everyone’s fourth chromosome, where the letters of the genetic alphabet normally repeat C-A-G as many as 35 times in a row. In people who develop Huntington’s, however, there are more than 35 repeats.

No one quite knows why this DNA hiccup causes cell death in the brain, leading Huntington’s patients to jerk and twitch uncontrollably and rendering them progressively unable to walk, talk, think and swallow. But the greater the number of repeats, the earlier symptoms tend to appear and the faster they progress.

Ms. Moser’s “CAG number” was 45, the counselor said. She had more repeats than her grandfather, whose first symptoms — loss of short-term memory, mood swings and a constant ticking noise he made with his mouth — surfaced when he turned 50. But it was another year before Ms. Moser would realize that she could have less than 12 years until she showed symptoms.

Immediately after getting her results, Ms. Moser was too busy making plans.

“I’m going to become super-strong and super-balanced,” she vowed over lunch with Ms. Elio, her straight brown hair pulled into a determined bun. “So when I start to lose it I’ll be a little closer to normal.”

In the tumultuous months that followed, Ms. Moser often found herself unable to remember what normal had once been. She forced herself to renounce the crush she had long nursed on a certain firefighter, sure that marriage was no longer an option for her. She threw herself into fund-raising in the hopes that someone would find a cure. Sometimes, she raged.

She never, she said, regretted being tested. But at night, crying herself to sleep in the dark of her lavender bedroom, she would go over and over it. She was the same, but she was also different. And there was nothing she could do.

A Lesson in Stigma

Ms. Moser grew up in Connecticut, part of a large Irish Catholic family. Like many families affected by Huntington’s, Ms. Moser’s regarded the disease as a curse, not to be mentioned even as it dominated their lives in the form of her grandfather’s writhing body and unpredictable rages.

Once, staying in Ms. Moser’s room on a visit, he broke her trundle bed with his violent, involuntary jerking. Another time, he came into the kitchen naked, his underpants on his head. When the children giggled, Ms. Moser’s mother defended her father: “If you don’t like it, get out of my house and go.”

But no one explained what had happened to their grandfather, Thomas Dowd, a former New York City police officer who once had dreams of retiring to Florida.

In 1990, Mr. Dowd’s older brother, living in a veteran’s hospital in an advanced stage of the disease, was strangled in his own restraints. But a year or so later, when Ms. Moser wanted to do her sixth-grade science project on Huntington’s, her mother recoiled.

“Why,” she demanded, “would you want to do it on this disease that is killing your grandfather?”

Ms. Moser was left to confirm for herself, through library books and a CD-ROM encyclopedia, that she and her brothers, her mother, her aunts, an uncle and cousins could all face the same fate.

Any child who has a parent with Huntington’s has a 50 percent chance of having inherited the gene that causes it, Ms. Moser learned.

Her mother, who asked not to be identified by name for fear of discrimination, had not always been so guarded. At one point, she drove around with a “Cure HD” sign in the window of her van. She told people that her father had “Woody Guthrie’s disease,” invoking the folk icon who died of Huntington’s in 1967.

But her efforts to raise awareness soon foundered. Huntington’s is a rare genetic disease, affecting about 30,000 people in the United States, with about 250,000 more at risk. Few people know what it is. Strangers assumed her father’s unsteady walk, a frequent early symptom, meant he was drunk.

“Nobody has compassion,” Ms. Moser’s mother concluded. “People look at you like you’re strange, and ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ”

Shortly after a simple DNA test became available for Huntington’s in 1993, one of Ms. Moser’s aunts tested positive. Another, driven to find out if her own medical problems were related to Huntington’s, tested negative. But when Ms. Moser announced as a teenager that she wanted to get tested one day, her mother insisted that she should not. If her daughter carried the gene, that meant she did, too. And she did not want to know.

“You don’t want to know stuff like that,” Ms. Moser’s mother said in an interview. “You want to enjoy life.”

Ms. Moser’s father, who met and married his wife six years before Ms. Moser’s grandfather received his Huntington’s diagnosis, said he had managed not to think much about her at-risk status.

“So she was at risk,” he said. “Everyone’s at risk for everything.”

The test, Ms. Moser remembers her mother suggesting, would cost thousands of dollars. Still, in college, Ms. Moser often trolled the Web for information about it. Mostly, she imagined how sweet it would be to know she did not have the gene. But increasingly she was haunted, too, by the suspicion that her mother did.

As awful as it was, she admitted to Ms. Elio, her freshman-year neighbor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, she almost hoped it was true. It would explain her mother’s strokes of meanness, her unpredictable flashes of anger.

Ms. Moser’s mother said she had never considered the conflicts with her daughter out of the ordinary. “All my friends who had daughters said that was all normal, and when she’s 25 she’ll be your best friend,” she said. “I was waiting for that to happen, but I guess it’s not happening.”

When Ms. Moser graduated in 2003 with a degree in occupational therapy, their relationship, never peaceful, was getting worse. She moved to Queens without giving her mother her new address.

Wanting to Know

Out of school, Ms. Moser soon spotted a listing for a job at Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center, a nursing home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She knew it was meant for her.

Her grandfather had died there in 2002 after living for a decade at the home, one of only a handful in the country with a unit devoted entirely to Huntington’s.

“I hated visiting him growing up,” Ms. Moser said. “It was scary.”

Now, though, she was drawn to see the disease up close.

On breaks from her duties elsewhere, she visited her cousin James Dowd, the son of her grandfather’s brother who had come to live in the Huntington’s unit several years earlier. It was there, in a conversation with another staff member, that she learned she could be tested for only a few hundred dollars at the Columbia clinic across town. She scheduled an appointment for the next week.

The staff at Columbia urged Ms. Moser to consider the downside of genetic testing. Some people battle depression after they test positive. And the information, she was cautioned, could make it harder for her to get a job or health insurance.

But Ms. Moser bristled at the idea that she should have to remain ignorant about her genetic status to avoid discrimination. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “It’s not like telling people I’m a drug addict.”

She also recalls rejecting a counselor’s suggestion that she might have asked to be tested as a way of crying for help.

“I’m like, ‘No,’ ” Ms. Moser recalls replying. “ ‘I’ve come to be tested because I want to know.’ ”

No one routinely collects demographic information about who gets tested for Huntington’s. At the Huntington’s Disease Center at Columbia, staff members say they have seen few young people taking the test.

Ms. Moser is still part of a distinct minority. But some researchers say her attitude is increasingly common among young people who know they may develop Huntington’s.

More informed about the genetics of the disease than any previous generation, they are convinced that they would rather know how many healthy years they have left than wake up one day to find the illness upon them. They are confident that new reproductive technologies can allow them to have children without transmitting the disease and are eager to be first in line should a treatment become available.

“We’re seeing a shift,” said Dr. Michael Hayden, a professor of human genetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who has been providing various tests for Huntington’s for 20 years. “Younger people are coming for testing now, people in their 20s and early 30s; before, that was very rare. I’ve counseled some of them. They feel it is part of their heritage and that it is possible to lead a life that’s not defined by this gene.”

Before the test, Ms. Moser made two lists of life goals. Under “if negative,” she wrote married, children and Ireland. Under “if positive” was exercise, vitamins and ballroom dancing. Balance, in that case, would be important. Opening a bed-and-breakfast, a goal since childhood, made both lists.

In the weeks before getting the test results, Ms. Moser gave Ms. Elio explicit instructions about acceptable responses. If she was negative, flowers were O.K. If positive, they were not. In either case, drinking was acceptable. Crying was not.

But it was Ms. Elio’s husband, Chris Elio, who first broached the subject of taking care of Ms. Moser, whom their young children called “my Katie,” as in “this is my mom, this is my dad, this is my Katie.” They should address it before the results were in, Mr. Elio told his wife, so that she would not feel, later, that they had done it out of a sense of obligation.

The next day, in an e-mail note that was unusually formal for friends who sent text messages constantly and watched “Desperate Housewives” while on the phone together, Ms. Elio told Ms. Moser that she and her husband wanted her to move in with them if she got sick. Ms. Moser set the note aside. She did not expect to need it.

‘It’s Too Hard to Look’

The results had come a week early, and Ms. Moser assured her friends that the “Sex and the City” trivia party she had planned for that night was still on. After all, she was not sick, not dying. And she had already made the dips.

“I’m the same person I’ve always been,” she insisted that night as her guests gamely dipped strawberries in her chocolate fountain. “It’s been in me from the beginning.”

But when she went to work the next day, she lingered outside the door of the occupational therapy gym, not wanting to face her colleagues. She avoided the Huntington’s floor entirely, choosing to attend to patients ailing of just about anything else. “It’s too hard to look at them,” she told her friends.

In those first months, Ms. Moser summoned all her strength to pretend that nothing cataclysmic had happened. At times, it seemed easy enough. In the mirror, the same green eyes looked back at her. She was still tall, a devoted Julia Roberts fan, a prolific baker.

She dropped the news of her genetic status into some conversations like small talk, but kept it from her family. She made light of her newfound fate, though often friends were not sure how to take the jokes.

“That’s my Huntington’s kicking in,” she told Rachel Markan, a co-worker, after knocking a patient’s folder on the floor.

Other times, Ms. Moser abruptly dropped any pretense of routine banter. On a trip to Florida, she and Ms. Elio saw a man in a wheelchair being tube-fed, a method often used to keep Huntington’s patients alive for years after they can no longer swallow.

“I don’t want a feeding tube,” she announced flatly.

In those early days, she calculated that she had at least until 50 before symptoms set in. That was enough time to open a bed-and-breakfast, if she acted fast. Enough time to repay $70,000 in student loans under her 30-year term.

Doing the math on the loans, though, could send her into a tailspin.

“I’ll be repaying them and then I’ll start getting sick,” she said. “I mean, there’s no time in there.”

Finding New Purpose

At the end of the summer, as the weather grew colder, Ms. Moser forced herself to return to the Huntington’s unit.

In each patient, she saw her future: the biophysicist slumped in his wheelchair, the refrigerator repairman inert in his bed, the onetime professional tennis player who floated through the common room, arms undulating in the startlingly graceful movements that had earned the disease its original name, “Huntington’s chorea,” from the Greek “to dance.”

Then there was her cousin Jimmy, who had wrapped papers for The New York Post for 19 years until suddenly he could no longer tie the knots. When she greeted him, his bright blue eyes darted to her face, then away. If he knew her, it was impossible to tell.

She did what she could for them. She customized their wheelchairs with padding to fit each one’s unique tics. She doled out special silverware, oversized or bent in just the right angles to prolong their ability to feed themselves.

Fending off despair, Ms. Moser was also filled with new purpose. Someone, somewhere, she told friends, had to find a cure.

It has been over a century since the disease was identified by George Huntington, a doctor in Amagansett, N.Y., and over a decade since researchers first found the gene responsible for it.

To raise money for research, Ms. Moser volunteered for walks and dinners and golf outings sponsored by the Huntington’s Disease Society of America. She organized a Hula-Hoop-a-thon on the roof of Cardinal Cooke, then a bowl-a-thon at the Port Authority. But at many of the events, attendance was sparse.

It is hard to get people to turn out for Huntington’s benefits, she learned from the society’s professional fund-raisers. Even families affected by the disease, the most obvious constituents, often will not help publicize events.

“They don’t want people to know they’re connected to Huntington’s,” Ms. Moser said, with a mix of anger and recognition. “It’s like in my family — it’s not a good thing.”

Her first session with a therapist brought a chilling glimpse of how the disorder is viewed even by some who know plenty about it. “She told me it was my moral and ethical obligation not to have children,” Ms. Moser told Ms. Elio by cellphone as soon as she left the office, her voice breaking.

In lulls between fund-raisers, Ms. Moser raced to educate her own world about Huntington’s. She added links about the disease to her MySpace page. She plastered her desk at work with “Cure HD” stickers and starred in a video about the Huntington’s unit for her union’s Web site.

Ms. Moser gave blood for one study and spoke into a microphone for researchers trying to detect subtle speech differences in people who have extra CAG repeats before more noticeable disease symptoms emerge.

When researchers found a way to cure mice bred to replicate features of the disease in humans, Ms. Moser sent the news to friends and acquaintances.

But it was hard to celebrate. “Thank God,” the joke went around on the Huntington’s National Youth Alliance e-mail list Ms. Moser subscribed to, “at least there won’t be any more poor mice wandering around with Huntington’s disease.”

In October, one of Ms. Moser’s aunts lost her balance while walking and broke her nose. It was the latest in a series of falls. “The cure needs to be soon for me,” Ms. Moser said. “Sooner for everybody else.”

A Confrontation in Court

In the waiting room of the Dutchess County family courthouse on a crisp morning in the fall of 2005, Ms. Moser approached her mother, who turned away.

“I need to tell her something important,” Ms. Moser told a family member who had accompanied her mother to the hearing.

He conveyed the message and brought one in return: Unless she was dying, her mother did not have anything to say to her.

That Ms. Moser had tested positive meant that her mother would develop Huntington’s, if she had not already. A year earlier, Ms. Moser’s mother had convinced a judge that her sister, Nora Maldonado, was neglecting her daughter. She was given guardianship of the daughter, 4-year-old Jillian.

Ms. Moser had been skeptical of her mother’s accusations that Ms. Maldonado was not feeding or bathing Jillian properly, and she wondered whether her effort to claim Jillian had been induced by the psychological symptoms of the disease.

Her testimony about her mother’s genetic status, Ms. Moser knew, could help persuade the judge to return Jillian. Ms. Maldonado had found out years earlier that she did not have the Huntington’s gene.

Ms. Moser did not believe that someone in the early stages of Huntington’s should automatically be disqualified from taking care of a child. But her own rocky childhood had convinced her that Jillian would be better off with Ms. Maldonado.

She told her aunt’s lawyer about her test results and agreed to testify.

In the courtroom, Ms. Moser took the witness stand. Her mother’s lawyer jumped up as soon as the topic of Huntington’s arose. It was irrelevant, he said. But by the time the judge had sustained his objections, Ms. Moser’s mother, stricken, had understood.

The next day, in the bathroom, Ms. Maldonado approached Ms. Moser’s mother.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Ms. Moser’s mother said nothing.

The court has continued to let Ms. Moser’s mother retain guardianship of Jillian. But she has not spoken to her daughter again.

“It’s a horrible illness,” Ms. Moser’s mother said, months later, gesturing to her husband. “Now he has a wife who has it. Did she think of him? Did she think of me? Who’s going to marry her?”

Facing the Future

Before the test, it was as if Ms. Moser had been balanced between parallel universes, one in which she would never get the disease and one in which she would. The test had made her whole.

She began to prepare the Elio children and Jillian for her illness, determined that they would not be scared, as she had been with her grandfather. When Jillian wanted to know how people got Huntington’s disease “in their pants,” Ms. Moser wrote the text of a children’s book that explained what these other kinds of “genes” were and why they would make her sick.

But over the winter, Ms. Elio complained gently that her friend had become “Ms. H.D.” And an impromptu note that arrived for the children in the early spring convinced her that Ms. Moser was dwelling too much on her own death.

“You all make me so happy, and I am so proud of who you are and who you will be,” read the note, on rainbow scratch-and-write paper. “I will always remember the fun things we do together.”

Taking matters into her own hands, Ms. Elio created a profile for Ms. Moser on an online dating service. Ms. Moser was skeptical but supplied a picture. Dating, she said, was the worst thing about knowing she had the Huntington’s gene. It was hard to imagine someone falling enough in love with her to take on Huntington’s knowingly, or asking it of someone she loved. At the same time, she said, knowing her status could help her find the right person, if he was out there.

“Either way, I was going to get sick,” she said. “And I’d want someone who could handle it. If, by some twist of fate, I do get married and have children, at least we know what we’re getting into.”

After much debate, the friends settled on the third date as the right time to mention Huntington’s. But when the first date came, Ms. Moser wished she could just blurt it out.

“It kind of just lingers there,” she said. “I really just want to be able to tell people, ‘Someday, I’m going to have Huntington’s disease.’ ”

‘A Part of My Life’

Last May 6, a year to the day after she had received her test results, the subject line “CAG Count” caught Ms. Moser’s attention as she was scrolling through the online discussion forums of the Huntington’s Disease Advocacy Center. She knew she had 45 CAG repeats, but she had never investigated it further.

She clicked on the message.

“My mother’s CAG was 43,” it read. “She started forgetting the punch line to jokes at 39/40.” Another woman whose husband’s CAG count was 47 had just sold his car. “He’s 39 years old,” she wrote. “It was time for him to quit driving.”

Quickly, Ms. Moser scanned a chart that accompanied the messages for her number, 45. The median age of onset to which it corresponded was 37.

Ms. Elio got drunk with her husband the night Ms. Moser finally told her.

“That’s 12 years away,” Ms. Moser said.

The statistic, they knew, meant that half of those with her CAG number started showing symptoms after age 37. But it also meant that the other half started showing symptoms earlier.

Ms. Moser, meanwhile, flew to the annual convention of the Huntington’s Disease Society, which she had decided at the last minute to attend.

“Mother or father?” one woman, 23, from Chicago, asked a few minutes after meeting Ms. Moser in the elevator of the Milwaukee Hilton. “Have you tested? What’s your CAG?”

She was close to getting herself tested, the woman confided. How did it feel to know?

“It’s hard to think the other way anymore of not knowing,” Ms. Moser replied. “It’s become a part of my life.”

After years of trying to wring conversation from her family about Huntington’s, Ms. Moser suddenly found herself bathing in it. But for the first time in a long time, her mind was on other things. At a youth support group meeting in the hotel hallway, she took her place in the misshapen circle. Later, on the dance floor, the spasms of the symptomatic seemed as natural as the gyrations of the normal.

“I’m not alone in this,” Ms. Moser remembers thinking. “This affects other people, too, and we all just have to live our lives.”

Seizing the Day

July 15, the day of Ms. Moser’s 25th birthday party, was sunny, with a hint of moisture in the air. At her aunt’s house in Long Beach, N.Y., Ms. Moser wore a dress with pictures of cocktails on it. It was, she and Ms. Elio told anyone who would listen, her “cocktail dress.” They drew the quotation marks in the air.

A bowl of “Cure HD” pins sat on the table. Over burgers from the barbecue, Ms. Moser mentioned to family members from her father’s side that she had tested positive for the Huntington’s gene.

“What’s that?” one cousin asked.

“It will affect my ability to walk, talk and think,” Ms. Moser said. “Sometime before I’m 50.”

“That’s soon,” an uncle said matter-of-factly.

“So do you have to take medication?” her cousin asked.

“There’s nothing really to take,” Ms. Moser said.

She and the Elios put on bathing suits, loaded the children in a wagon and walked to the beach.

More than anything now, Ms. Moser said, she is filled with a sense of urgency.

“I have a lot to do,” she said. “And I don’t have a lot of time.”

Over the next months, Ms. Moser took tennis lessons every Sunday morning and went to church in the evening.

When a planned vacation with the Elio family fell through at the last minute, she went anyway, packing Disney World, Universal Studios, Wet ’n Wild and Sea World into 36 hours with a high school friend who lives in Orlando. She was honored at a dinner by the New York chapter of the Huntington’s society for her outreach efforts and managed a brief thank-you speech despite her discomfort with public speaking.

Having made a New Year’s resolution to learn to ride a unicycle, she bought a used one. “My legs are tired, my arms are tired, and I definitely need protection,” she reported to Ms. Elio. On Super Bowl Sunday, she waded into the freezing Atlantic Ocean for a Polar Bear swim to raise money for the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Ms. Elio complained that she hardly got to see her friend. But one recent weekend, they packed up the Elio children and drove to the house the Elios were renovating in eastern Pennsylvania. The kitchen floor needed grouting, and, rejecting the home improvement gospel that calls for a special tool designed for the purpose, Ms. Moser and Ms. Elio had decided to use pastry bags.

As they turned into the driveway, Ms. Moser studied the semi-attached house next door. Maybe she would move in one day, as the Elios had proposed. Then, when she could no longer care for herself, they could put in a door.

First, though, she wanted to travel. She had heard of a job that would place her in different occupational therapy positions across the country every few months and was planning to apply.

“I’m thinking Hawaii first,” she said.

Then they donned gloves, mixed grout in a large bucket of water and began the job.

Max Brenner chocolate

NYMag

Few legal substances exert as strong a pull as chocolate, which might explain the slightly dazed and practically drooling crowds streaming in and out of Max Brenner: Chocolate by the Bald Man, the glitzy new Union Square emporium that’s part retail sweetshop, part café, and all slickly packaged cocoa-­scented theme park. With its vats of swirling molten chocolate, its ceiling pipes painted to resemble ­Oompa-­Loompa–esque cocoa conduits, and the goofy ­chocolate-­centric slogans scribbled everywhere, it’s hard to separate the place from the superslick marketing plan. For the ­chocolate-­obsessed New Yorker, intimately familiar with the single-origin oeuvre of everyone from Jacques Torres to La Maison du Chocolat’s Robert Linxe, one question is even more pressing than whether to sample the chocolate bagel or the chocolate pizza: Who is this Max Brenner, and how come I’ve never heard of him?

The answer is bittersweet. Just as there is no Johnny Rocket and, sadly, no Chuck E. Cheese, there is no living, breathing Max Brenner—well, not really. The name is actually a composite of two Israeli marketing geniuses, Max Fichtman and Oded Brenner, who launched the business ten years ago in Ra’anana and sold it to Strauss-Elite (Israel’s version of Kraft), which now operates outposts and franchises from Melbourne to Makati City. Somewhere over the course of spreading the chocolate gospel, the ­European-trained (and sufficiently bald) chocolatier Oded Brenner has adopted the ­Wonka-like persona of “Max Brenner.” These days, he can generally be found at his newest location, expediting orders, munching chocolate-covered toast, and ensuring that the venture continues to position itself as the joyful antithesis of the intimidating realm that, his press materials assert, haute chocolate inhabits. Trouble is, Brenner’s self-proclaimed “new worldwide chocolate culture” comes off as just the sort of ­tourist-­targeting spectacle you’d expect to find in Times Square, animated with loud Euro-­accented house music and an abundance of overwrought, often overly sweet concoctions.

Like ChikaLicious and Room 4 Dessert, Max Brenner strives to be a dessert destination, and the minuscule café tables tend to be taken by groups of ­diet-be-damned girlfriends yapping away like overstimulated mynah birds, gurgling tots, and sheepish young couples on dates. The fact that the liquor license hasn’t arrived hasn’t hurt business one bit; most evenings, there’s a bottleneck at the hostess stand. Service, by the way, is friendly and well meaning, although the wait for food can be long. That wait means there’s plenty of time to study the room, done up in the usual ­cocoa-themed color palette of browns, caramel, orange, and cream, and to read the suggestive writing on the walls: VERY MUCH CHOCOLATE. YUMMY … STOP IT MAX, THIS IS ALREADY TOO MUCH. That’s a sentiment you can’t argue with after flipping through the somewhat disorienting menu, filled as it is with descriptors like “popping candies,” “chocolate licks,” and “crunchy bits,” and arranged into a dozen or so categories like “Max Iscream” (ice cream), Sweet Icons (fondues, soups, s’mores), and Desserts (cakes, ­meringues, truffles), many of them available grouped together on one plate like a BBQ combination platter.

The best way to order may be to resort to the same method some people use for finding a plumber in the Yellow Pages: Close your eyes, open up the book, and go with whatever your index finger happens to land on. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with one of the fondues, like the Popsicle version—vanilla ice cream on a stick that comes on an embarrassing cartoon baby tray of sorts with little bowls of delicious melted chocolate, “crunchy chocolate waffle balls” that taste like Kit Kats, and the ever-­popular “crunchy bits,” which seem like crushed praline. You dip the ice-­creamsicle into the chocolate and then roll it around in the crunchy things like a recalcitrant 5-year-old who plays with his food. If you’re unlucky, you’ll end up with the cloyingly sweet ­chocolate-topped and ­­crunchy-bitted pizza, or, worse, the Melting Chocolate Heart Cake, which your server will recommend and dutifully describe to you as never having elicited anything but squeals of joy but is really just a not-so-­molten chocolate cake—more dormant volcano than hot lava flow.

Special attention is paid to drinks, perhaps because their ­custom-made vessels are sold in the shop. Of the various hot chocolates, all of them good, the best is the rich “Italian” version. It’s as thick as maple syrup, with a nicely balanced, dark-­chocolate complexity. You can order this invigorating libation to go at the takeout bar or in the dining room, where it’s delivered to the table in what your server will describe to you as a “hug mug,” a ceramic cup tapered at one end in such a way as to encourage the drinker to grasp it reverently with both hands the way a frostbitten Swede cuddles his goblet of glogg. It’s much more user-­friendly than the “suckao,” a bizarre apparatus in which you melt chocolate into milk over a candle flame and sip the resulting brew through a metal straw.

Because man (be he bald-­headed or well ­coiffed) cannot live by chocolate alone, Max Brenner also offers a hodgepodge of savory dishes, from “giant” omelettes to “giant” kielbasa, presumably to fortify its customers for the impending sugar onslaught and to lower their risk of going into diabetic shock. As is often the case with menus that reach beyond their areas of expertise, none of this stuff goes over well. Just as you would not go to Il Mulino for a white-­chocolate-­Oreo-­cookie frappé, you shouldn’t come to Max Brenner: Chocolate by the Bald Man for its lasagne Bolognese. That dish is a ­college-­cafeteria-­level rendition served, unfathomably, with a little bowl of what your server informs you is crème fraîche. Likewise, a croque madame that substitutes a waffle for bread is a dish more to be pitied than censured. And then there is Max’s pastrami sandwich: One way you can tell that it’s different from the one at Katz’s is that it’s served between two slices of French toast. On a more positive note, that giant kielbasa sandwich, served with sauerkraut, grainy mustard, and chile mayonnaise, isn’t half bad, and just try ordering a dish like that at La Maison du Chocolat.

No Stars
Max Brenner: Chocolate by the Bald Man
841 Broadway, nr. 13th St.; 212-388-0030

Korean fried chicken

NYTimes

February 7, 2007
Koreans Share Their Secret for Chicken With a Crunch
By JULIA MOSKIN

WHEN Joe McPherson moved to Seoul in 2002, he thought he was leaving fried chicken behind. “I grew up watching Popeyes training videos,” Mr. McPherson said. His father managed a Popeyes franchise near Atlanta and fried chicken was a constant presence in his life.

“Living in the South, you think you know fried chicken,” he said. But in Seoul, he said, “there is a mom-and-pop chicken place literally on every corner.” Many Asian cooking traditions include deep-fried chicken, but the popular cult of crunchy, spicy, perfectly nongreasy chicken — the apotheosis of the Korean style — is a recent development.

In the New York area, Korean-style fried chicken places have just begun to appear, reproducing the delicate crust, addictive seasoning and moist meat Koreans are devoted to.

“Food in Korea is very trendy,” said Myung J. Chung, an owner of the Manhattan franchise of Bon Chon Chicken, a karaoke-and-chicken lounge that opened in December. “Other trends last two or three years, but fried chicken has lasted for 20 years,” he said.

Platters of fried chicken are a hugely popular bar food in South Korea — like chicken wings in the United States, they are downed with beer or soju, after work or after dinner, rarely eaten as a meal.

“Some places have a very thin, crisp skin; some places have more garlicky, sticky sauces; some advertise that they are healthy because they fry in 100 percent olive oil,” said Mr. McPherson, an English teacher, who writes a food blog called zenkimchi.com/FoodJournal.

“Suddenly there will be a long line outside one chicken place, for no apparent reason, and then the next week, it’s somewhere else.”

Even Korea’s corner bars and fast-food chicken chains are preoccupied with the quality, freshness and integrity of their product.

With Korean-style chicken outlets opening recently in New York, New Jersey and California, fried chicken has begun to complete its round-trip flight from the States to Seoul.

“I really think we make it better than the original,” said Young Jin, who opened a friendly little chicken joint called Unidentified Flying Chickens in Jackson Heights last month. “We use fresh, not frozen, chicken, always fried to order, no trans fats, no heat lamps.”

In Korea, chickens are much smaller, so the whole chicken is fried and served, hacked up into bite-size pieces. But the large breasts and thighs of American chickens are a challenge to cook evenly.

According to Mr. Jin and others, that’s why the Korean-style chicken places here serve mostly wings (true connoisseurs can specify either the upper “arm” or the “wing”) and small drumsticks. The chicken is typically seasoned only after it is fried, with either a sweetish garlic-soy glaze or a hotter red-pepper sauce that brings the dish into Buffalo wing territory.

But do not look for blue cheese and celery sticks, or even biscuits and gravy. The typical accompaniment to Korean fried chicken is cubes of pickled radish and plenty of beer or soju; the combination produces an irresistible repetition of salt and spice, cold and hot, briny and sweet, crunchy and tender.

“People — even Americans — say the combination is really addictive,” said Ryan Jhun, Mr. Chung’s brother-in-law and business partner. Mr. Jhun spent a month training with the founder of Bon Chon to master the chain’s frying method, which produces characteristically light and crunchy pieces. Bon Chon, Bon Bon and Unidentified Flying Chickens all base their technique on the one developed by Kyochon, one of the most popular Korean chains. Although none of the chicken fryers interviewed would describe the method in its entirety, its outline is clear. (Warning: partisans of Southern-fried chicken will find much that is blasphemous in the following.)

For crunch, American-style fried chicken relies on a thick, well-seasoned crust, often made even thicker by soaking the chicken pieces beforehand in buttermilk. When that crust is nubbly and evenly browned, and the chicken meat is cooked through, the chicken is sublime. But too often, the flesh is still raw when the crust is cooked, or the skin never cooks all the way through, leaving a flabby layer of skin between the meat and the crust.

Korean-style fried chicken is radically different, reflecting an Asian frying technique that renders out the fat in the skin, transforming it into a thin, crackly and almost transparent crust. (Chinese cooks call this “paper fried chicken.”) The chicken is unseasoned, barely dredged in very fine flour and then dipped into a thin batter before going into the fryer. The oil temperature is a relatively low 350 degrees, and the chicken is cooked in two separate stages.

After 10 minutes, the chicken is removed from the oil, shaken vigorously in a wire strainer and allowed to cool for two minutes. This slows the cooking process, preventing the crust from getting too brown before the meat cooks through. It also shaves off all those crusty nubs and crags that American cooks strive for.

After 10 more minutes in the fryer, the chicken is smooth, compact, golden-brown, and done. Then, it’s served plain (with a small dish of salt and pepper for seasoning) or lightly painted with sauce. When it’s done correctly, the sauce is absorbed into the crust, adding savor without making it soggy.

Last week, I tasted chicken from four different Korean-style spots, and arrived at a rule of thumb that the best chicken had the least sauce (although chicken with no sauce at all was weirdly bland). The chain Cheogajip was more heavy-handed with the sauce than the others, making their chicken too sticky and sweet. But all the other chicken was at least tasty and even delicious, remaining crisp through the day and when reheated the next morning. The sauces at Unidentified Flying Chickens, which Mr. Jin makes from scratch and is still developing, had the most rounded flavors.

Mr. Jin sees his new store, located in a neighborhood that is more Latino than Asian, as the cradle of a multicultural empire devoted to one thing: perfect fried chicken.

“You wouldn’t go to a soft tofu store and expect to find great kalbi,” he said, referring to the grilled, sweet-and-salty short ribs that are another Korean favorite. “When you make only one thing, and you make people wait for 20 minutes to get it, it had better be good.”

A Sampler

Here are places to try Korean-style fried chicken in New York City. Seating is often limited. All chicken is fried to order, so for takeout or delivery, call at least 30 minutes ahead.

BON CHON CHICKEN 314 Fifth Avenue (32nd Street), second floor, (212) 221-2222; and 157-18 Northern Boulevard (58th Street), Queens, (718) 321-3818.

BON BON CHICKEN 98 Chambers Street (Church Street), (212) 227-2375, opening in March.

UNIDENTIFIED FLYING CHICKENS 71-22 Roosevelt Avenue (71st Street), Queens, (718) 205-6662.