So now that I’ve gotten into rabbinic school, now what? Besides trying to figure out how I’m going to afford to go, along with the expenses and overdue bills of the rest of my life, and, you know, how I’m going to survive learning and studying in biblical Hebrew, rabbinic Hebrew, and ancient Aramaic (not to mention American Sign Language, a specialty of my new school) for five years, something else won’t stop gnawing at me.

How does rabbinic school change you? Who will I be if I manage to make it through to smicha (ordination)? For that matter, who am I now, really? A lot of navel gazing, but here’s the thing. I keep wondering over and over, what do all the rabbis whom I know personally do when they’re angry? When they’re annoyed? When they’re sad? When they’re just human and feeling edgy-lifey?

For those of you who are reading, that magnanimous smile can’t always be there. Can it? Is that part of the way rabbinic school changed you? Or did you go in that way, too?

What about the moments when the very last of your nerves has frayed and far beyond, and then beyond that? Those moments when you just want to scream? Or not hold your tongue? Or walk behind closed doors and through something that isn’t a pillow at something not amenable to its continued existence in one piece?

Because I have those moments. Those very human, very imperfect, very I-just-want-my-mom moments. I know my Jewish life is a journey to learn to transcend them. To find the humor, and pathos, and compassion towards myself and everyone else on the planet that hides behind the ups and, especially, downs of daily existence. But still, I have them. And they suck. And they make me wonder how fit I am really for rabbinic school.

I’d love to know, how much a rabbi is the person she or he was before beginning rabbinic school? How much a rabbi fundamentally changed in rabbinic school? And maybe more importantly, stayed the same?

I’ve encountered so many totally self-assured prospective rabbinic students. They’re all so much younger than I am. Is this one of the anxieties that comes from making such a big decision in the middle of your life? Would they wonder the same thing if they were old enough to have seen (and finally admitted) another couple of decades of their personal patterns?

At the moment, all I know is who I am and where I’m hopefully headed. In five years, for better or worse, que sera sera, I guess.

Whoever I’ll be, I’ll be.

It was the best of Shavuot. It was the worst of Shavuot. Maybe a little bit of both in each place that I experienced the “Festival of Weeks” this year to mark, as our traditions tells, God’s giving of the Torah to the Jewish people at Sinai. Wherever I went, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing: Jews of all ages together.

I spent Shavuot with young Jews, and with older Jews–but not at the same time, and that left me pondering once again how and why we Jews often abdicate our experience of our religious holidays to our children. I’ve made waves on the issue before, but I’m not alone in my thinking. Last Sukkot, Rabbi Peter Knobel (backstory) shared the bimah at Emanuel Congregation and asked rhetorically why the morning festival service he was co-leading was far emptier than the evening family service had been. He answered his own question: because time and again liberal Jews make our experience of Jewish holidays completely about our kids.

I agree. But why do we do it? What is that costing us? And what might happen if we did things differently? Hold those thoughts for just a moment.

Ever since Rabbi Rick Jacobs became the new president of the Union of Reform Judaism, the URJ has adopted an earnest Campaign for Youth Engagement. No secret within the Jewish community, study after study for the past few decades has pointed out that synagogue membership and participation by Jews under 40 is miniscule–and membership from Jews over 40 is in many areas declining. As our houses of worship and teaching and other Jewish institutions continue to combine and close, even in big cities, what to do? For the URJ–replenish the older-adult members who have walked away with young adult Jews.

Of course, there’s a problem with that. Why are the over-40 Jews walking away? And what’s to keep our newly engaged youth (if indeed we manage to engage them) from walking away, themselves, when they become too old for our earnest “engagement campaigns”? Hold onto that for a moment too.

So back to Shavuot. I originally intended to attend my shul’s evening festival service. Emanuel, like many other Reform congregations, celebrates the “Confirmation” of its oldest religious school students at this service. Last time I attended, it was a beautiful ritual–our exiting students standing on the bimah reciting in their own words what Judaism meant to them. (Just like I did when I converted.) But that’s where it ended. As for adult discussion or contemplation of the actual meaning of the holiday–receiving the commandments that guide our Jewish lives to holiness–not much was said.

That’s the standard way my Reform synagogue observes the many holidays that give life to the Jewish calendar (often including, as noted above, the weekly Shabbat). However, this isn’t meant to be a particular criticism–most liberal synagogues (and some Orthodox ones, too) make what to outsider eyes (or convert eyes, like mine) might seem like a fetish out of what Rabbi Knobel called that day on the bimah at Emanuel “the infantilization of our holidays.” Yes, we are a Jewish People including Jews of all ages. But somehow, for some reason, when it comes to observing, celebrating, or otherwise experiencing the religious holidays that are the heritage of all Jews, we concentrate almost completely on the experience of those holidays by our children.

And that removes a really important element that our Jewish children need to experience if we want to keep them as affiliated Jewish grown-ups: useful modeling of how to experience Jewish holidays in a meaningful way as adults. Keep that ball in the air for a moment, too.

As it turned out, this year I chose to go elsewhere on Erev (evening) Shavuot. Though I don’t attend very often, I enjoy very much the energetic, musically inspired nature of Chicago’s itinerant independent congregation, Mishkan. I decided to attend their tikkun (a traditional late-night study session in honor of Shavuot) instead. I never feel exactly at home at Mishkan but I’m always enriched by my time there–the community skews far younger than I am, and in fact was founded as an alternative for Chicago’s disaffected young Jews to have a Jewish spiritual home beyond a synagogue that might ask them to pay several thousand dollars a year to help pay salaries and keep the doors open.

The evening was crowded and inspired–and funded by mainline Jewish institutions and congregations. File that away, too–and I promise I’ll help you review all those files soon.

The following morning, I attended Temple Sholom‘s festival/Yizkor (remembrance) service (shared each year with my own congregation.) As is almost always the case with non-”family” festival services outside of the High Holy Days–and as was the case at the aforementioned Sukkot service led by Rabbi Knobel, which is why he made his observation in the first place–very few people were there in attendance. And I, at nearly 43 years of age, was obviously the youngest person in the room. Hold that, too, and I promise we’re almost there.

The biggest reason I wanted to attend Mishkan’s tikkun was Rabbi Benay Lappe, head of radical yeshiva SVARA and Talmud professor at Hebrew Seminary, to whom I owe the most gratitude for nudging me to submit my rabbinic school application there. (The application that got me in!) I wanted to hear her popular CRASH presentation. In it, she examines the nature of worldviews–religious and otherwise. That is, that they never last forever, and when they crash, how the pieces are picked up determines what parts of the old worldview will or won’t live on. Either you run back to your failed worldview and hide from reality, reject it completely and cut yourself off from your past, or explore ways to synthesize what’s new about your world with the pieces of your old worldview that still have relevance.

The implications of the talk for an audience like Mishkan were clear: don’t fear the decline of synagogue affiliation, it’s just what happens. Every time Judaism has crashed, it has shrunk in numbers, often greatly, and then recovered in an altered form. Communities like Mishkan might–or might not–be the Jewish model of the future. But what’s really causing the current crash? And are legacy institutions powerless to do anything about it? That’s the last thing to keep in mind before we come in for a landing, I promise.

Rabbi Lappe was joined by Rabbi Dan Libenson discussing his also popular ideas about disruptive innovation in Judaism. He explained how the change that survives and often replaces the current status quo almost always comes from beyond status-quo institutions. He laid this out explicitly: existing synagogues can’t reach out properly to Jews like those who fill Mishkan services because they have their hands full taking care of the needs of their existing members.

But…do they really? How does a year of Jewish holidays and Shabbat mornings concentrating almost exclusively on the experience of those Jewish holidays by children and remaining silent on the holistically simultaneous experience of those same holy Jewish moments by the adult Jews to whom they are related and with whom they share their congregational communities “take care of the needs” of existing members? How does it turn young-adult Jews into lifelong synagogue members? How does it keep older adults engaged at all on an adult level?

How does it, in fact, keep anyone from continuing to walk away?

In the words of Rabbi Lappe, CRASH.

So why do we infantilize our holidays? One word: fear. After three millennia of off-again, on-again tsouris, our people can be forgiven for fearing for our survival. But after so many pause-inducing population surveys trumpeting our approaching demise, have we made survival our only goal?

For a people dedicated to living joyously within Creation under the yoke of the mitzvot, funny thing about survival. It’s not really living at all. It’s merely the art of not dying. This is not the best we can do. This is not why God created is. If you think about it, how could it possibly be so?

Yet this art of not dying penetrates Jewish living so thoroughly, that it is as if we idolize it. Loving or marrying someone who isn’t Jewish? Making ourselves noticed by proselytizing Judaism? (From a convert’s eyes, not necessarily a bad thing–we all had to be invited in somehow.) Adopting innovative pay-by-conscience synagogue membership models (which are working in real life in several places already) rather than excluding Jews who don’t have deep enough pockets to pay to experience their own religion in a communal setting? Wasting a minute–or a second–of Jewish time with any heightened religious meaning on not making a pageant out of our young doing junior Jewish things? After surviving often in spite of ourselves for three millennia, do we really believe that these things will kills us off as a religious civilization?

Could it not be that acting on our fear for survival, we are actually bringing about the current Jewish crash ourselves? Could it not be that our fear of Klal Ysrael getting smaller is leading us to take actions that are actively making it smaller?

How does a synagogue survive financially or communally when older members disengage? Or when younger members, no matter how engaged we make them in their youth, walk away eventually anyway for lack of active mid-life religious role modeling–because we have sent them the astounding message through the infantilization of our holiday observances that the moment you’re allowed to read from the Torah on the bimah, it ceases being important for you to be on the bimah anymore? 

For that matter, how does a community of young-adult Jews survive without either the financial support of the same legacy Jewish institutions whose decline has turned off these Jews in the first place, or growing their own mid-life machers, which gets such communities dangerously close to the legacy synagogue model that they so clearly want no part of?

They don’t. Neither one. How could they? Our youth in either case have been trained very well that synagogues have nothing for them. But not because there’s nothing for them as youth. Because there’s nothing there for them as adults.

Except there is. Or there could be. But we never model it. We never crow about it. We never step away from keeping our Jewish children Jewish children long enough to show them how to be Jewish adults–in the building, in a pew holding a siddur, on the bimah holding the Torah, regularly in a synagogue at all.

Whenever I have raised this with other Jews, they immediately bristle. If we don’t spend so much time on the children, they say, they’ll never stick around as adults. I can take care of my Jewish needs on my own, anyway. I don’t need to spend time in synagogue for myself.

It’s pretty clear which of those messages our children have found most resonant for many years. It’s not the one where we shove them up on the bimah at all costs. It’s the one where we walk away as adults, so they do too. No one else is doing this to us. We are crashing Judaism ourselves.

And we’re doing a really good job of it, too. Our idol should not be survival. Our allegiance belongs to Deity. We show that allegiance through the way we live our lives. The best way to put on the brakes and stop crashing Judaism would be to start actually living those Jewish lives.

If legacy synagogues want to survive–and if communities like Mishkan have a chance at continuity–they have to find a way to be inclusive of the adult experience of Judaism. That is what our Jewish children need to see. That is how we are failing them, although we think we are doing the best we can.

It doesn’t matter where the programming is. It does matter that it not be strictly age segregated. If synagogues want Jewish youth to stick around, they need to make room for healthy, joyous, relevant adult modeling throughout the Hebrew year, on every day that we come together as Jews. If communities like Mishkan are to survive, they need to be reaching out to older adult Jews with the wherewithal to sustain the cost of leadership, materials, and events. Of course, our legacy and innovative institutions are both exploring such things. But out of fear or simple inertia, lots of us simply aren’t on board.

That’s a shame. We need to be in the same worship spaces and beit midrashim together, young, midlife, and old, so that we can learn and model for each other how important every stage of the Jewish lifecycle is. Most importantly, as KAMII’s now-outgoing Rabbi Batsheva Appel very astutely noted while visiting Emanuel on Shabbat a few months ago, so that together we can find again the emotional relevance of Judaism in our own lives, which is the only enduring thing that makes and keeps us Jews.

Our youth need us more than we realize. They need us to be active, engaged, Jews, and they need to see us choosing to be active, engaged Jews for our own sake, not for theirs. Then, and only then, will they choose to step back in the doors of our synagogues.

And if they do, they’ll be doing it for their own sakes. Not for ours.

So, a week ago I applied to rabbinic school. Here’s what I learned today.

Here’s the deal. I realized during my conversion journey that I wanted to be a rabbi. It seemed completely audacious to even think of such a thing since I was not even a Jew yet and had only a few months of Jewish knowledge under my belt. The thought never left me and nine months after my conversion, I finally shared my feelings with a local fourth-year rabbinic student who attends my synagogue. She told me to give it more time, and invited me to audit one of her classes. Another nine months later, I audited her Talmud class and when it was over the rabbi teaching the class told me I belonged in it.

A month later I sat down with that rabbi to talk seriously about applying to rabbinic school, and a couple of months after that I sat down with the head of the school (Hebrew Seminary in north-suburban Skokie) who made it clear that he thought I belonged in rabbinic school, too. That was four months ago. Since then, both the Talmud teacher and the head of the program have reached out to me (directly and through friends) to nudge me along.

Four somewhat conflicting things have haunted me since this school and I started courting each other:

• I can’t shake the feeling that I just haven’t lived Jewishly long enough for me to be moving forward with this;
• I can’t silence the inner voice that keeps telling me that this is something I *must* do;
• I wish I had a yeshiva background or some other form of young-adult Jewish education; and
• Dammit, my entire life has been in a kind of doldrums-y holding pattern for the past four months since the head of the school handed me an application packet and I filed it away on a low shelf of my desk.

On Thursday, that last bullet point very unexpectedly started screaming in my ear. I went with it, set everything aside, pulled out the application materials, filled them out, and spent the next two days writing what turned out to be a six-page personal statement. Although I was surprised to be doing it, I felt a lot of peace and clarity that I hadn’t felt for months.

On Saturday night after sundown, after a big argument with Ryan over whether the school (or really, the synagogue where it’s housed) had a mail slot, he drove me the five miles over there (yes, I live five miles from my prospective rabbinic program) and I pushed the application through, until I heard it drop to the floor on the other side.

And the we went home and all I wanted was fried food covered in cheese, alcohol, and a steady stream of Disney park ride videos to shake the feeling that writing a personal statement for a rabbinic school was a lot like doing emotional surgery on myself with a blunt scalpel and without anesthesia.

I’ve either just done the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life, or five and a half years from now I’ll be Rabbi Doyle. What will be is in God’s hands, and more important right now is for me to find full employment (hello house expenses, hello old student loan, hello back taxes) and make sure my head doesn’t explode until Ryan and I get to Walt Disney World on Memorial Day weekend to continue his 40th birthday bi-coastal year of Disney.

I have no idea how I’ll afford to go if I get in. I need to get over the feeling that I’m in way over my head. I need to concentrate on the feeling that I’ll make a great rabbi. Because I will. And I need to kick my own butt into studying my Hebrew every day from now until however this turns out.

I know there are rabbinical students and rabbis out there for whom sending in their application was matter-of-fact easy. There must be rabbinic students out there whose decision to move forward was as fraught as mine has been. I always say struggle means you’re doing Jewish right, though, so maybe my anxiety is a good sign.

I’ve heard more than a few times from well-meaning people who care about me, and I’ve read more than a few times in articles and blog posts about considering the rabbinate, that it might be better to consider other ways to serve the Jewish people. After all, rabbinic school is expensive, the workload is challenging, and finding a job these days is hard. And really, the world doesn’t need another rabbi. I have only one thing to say in response.

Says who?

Do you think anyone else has the right to tell you who you can and cannot sleep with? Do you think anyone else has the right to determine who you can romantically court? Make love to? Marry? Share a life with?

Exactly. So why do so many of my fellow Jews think they have a right to determine who their rabbi courts, makes love to, marries, and/or shares a life with? Our human right to love who love leads us to love does not somehow cease to exist just because some of the gate-keepers of denominational Judaism live in perpetual fear of the extinction of Klal Yisrael.

As I’ve blogged before (see in particular Rock, Paper, Scissors, Synagogue and Progressive Judaism Versus the World), that kind of “Judaism of Survival” does little more than tell outsiders–and other Jews as well–that the best we can do from generation to generation is hope that our children turn out somehow still Jewish, whatever the emotional cost and familial consternation we may have to generate today to try and make that happen. Anything more than that out of life is gravy.

That’s not my Judaism. I live by my Judaism, I don’t merely survive by it. That’s not what I was put here on earth to do, nor is it why you’re here, either. If the best we could do as Jews was mere to survive, healing the world by redeeming all those broken shards of creation would be an impossibility. I hardly think God is that short-sighted, do you?

The rabbinic schools affiliated with denominational Judaism, however, are another story. Rolling along for a few months now has been a  debate about whether Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Reform Judaism’s rabbinic school–and by extension all denominationally affiliated rabbinic programs, should admit students who are married to or otherwise in committed relationships with non-Jews. (See recent stories in Reform Judaism Magazine, Sh’ma, The Times of Israel, and last week in The Jewish Daily Forward.)

An April blog post from one liberal rabbi goes so far as to say that allowing intermarried rabbinical students (and by extension, intermarried rabbis), “makes us look bad.” I’m not entirely sure who that “us” is, though–all of the Jewish people, or just those of us with the alleged good sense not to have non-Jewish relatives? The same post goes on to set the rabbinate on a pedestal above other Jews. In this worldview, rabbis are supposed to be living models of how Jews are supposed to live in a perfect world.

Except that we don’t live in a perfect world (hence all those broken shards of creation we go around redeeming throughout our lives.) And if there’s anything I’ve learned from the rabbis I know personally, it’s that the most dangerous thing a rabbi can do–both for their own inner well-being and that of their community–is to go through their lives expecting (or in this case, demanding) to be the most important person in the room.

As a future rabbinic student, I think the debate is tragic, in a literal sense. The reality is and will continue to be that some Jews intermarry, some Jews don’t. To say our rabbis can’t do what so many other Jews do is to tell those intermarried Jews and their spouses that they aren’t welcome under Judaism’s communal tent. To my mind, alienating hundreds of thousands of Jews and their extended families by reifying policies that ensure they cannot directly relate with our liturgical leaders is a powerful way to ensure denominational continuity doesn’t happen.

But if about 3,500 years of imperfect, improbable, yet undeniable Jewish history is any indication, Jews will continue to be.

I’m a Jew-by-choice who affiliates with a Reform synagogue, and I’m gay. Although we live Jewishly and he tremendously identifies as Jewish, my partner is not yet officially a Jew. He may be officially Jewish someday but it isn’t going to happen tomorrow. I’ll be going to rabbinic school. Because of the small-mindedness of HUC-JIR, I will not be applying there, within my own movement. Instead, I’ll be applying to an independent rabbinic school–and unlike HUC-JIR, the school, knowing my background, is already interested in my enrolling there.

And if I remain in my relationship, and I go, and I graduate, and become Rabbi Doyle, what exactly will HUC-JIR’s policy have stopped from happening? It won’t stop me from being a deeply committed rabbinical student. It won’t stop me from becoming a deeply committed rabbi. But it will stop me from being a deeply committed member of the Reform movement, potentially for the rest of my life.

In truth, the only thing that outdated denominational policies demonizing intermarriage achieve is competent rabbis and rabbis-to-be turning their backs on denominational Judaism. That’s it. What they don’t stop, however, is rabbinical students from becoming rabbis, differently thinking Jews from becoming innovative Jewish leaders.

There are so many debates in which it behooves us as Jews to enter gracefully and peacefully and with an open mind to see the potential to adopt the opposing viewpoint. There are an infinite number of instances in which a rabbinic student or rabbi should engage with love and kindness and flowers and puppies and unyielding equanimity.

This is not one of them. No one has a right to tell anyone else who they can love. And no one has a right to tell intermarried Jews–either directly or by dint of gate-keeping policies based on fear and fear alone–that they are somehow lesser Jews, and not worthy of the rabbinate. Of the many Jewish values possible to use as the moral bedrock of the rabbinate, seeing all people equal under God would go a lot farther than “some of you are better than others and I’m better than the whole lot of you.”

I’m reminded of a marvelous quote from the 1995 movie, The American President, spoken by Annette Bening’s character, Sydney Ellen Wade, in reference to a Presidential candidate who clearly held average Americans in contempt: “How do you have patience for people who claim they love America, but clearly can’t stand Americans?”

Or in this case, how do you have patience for rabbinic programs that claim to love Judaism, but clearly can’t stand actual Jews?

Considering that Reform, in particular, is currently seeking a way forward that brings unaffiliated Jews back into the fold, any loss engendered by HUC-JIR’s wrong-headed admissions policy is not on the part of potential rabbinical students. It is a wide Jewish world and HUC-JIR is not the only rabbinic program on the planet by any means.

Instead, the loss is on the part of a movement unwilling to embrace its members for who they are, to honestly acknowledge what Reform Jews and their families look like in real life. Of course, I can’t know for sure how HUC-JIR thinks they look. I can only know how God thinks they look. Kedoshim tiheyu, ki kadosh ani, Adonai Eloheichem.

They look holy.

So I was wrong, and that’s how Judaism manages to be a living, dynamic faith. In a recent previous post I wrote that I wouldn’t be observing the traditional prohibition on cutting one’s hair during the Omer. (See Omer Is My Siddur? Alone on a Shelf.)

So okay, I trimmed my beard–one time, for work purposes, which is technically a kosher thing to do. The mop on my head that looks like there’s a large, hairy jungle attacking a Liliputian-sized kippah is another story altogether. I kept telling Ryan I needed a haircut. I intended to get it done. Even after Ryan trimmed his own headly hirsuteness, I still didn’t get with the program.

Honestly, it was laziness and inertia at first. But as the Omer–and my counting of it–continued, I admit I felt a growing tinge of sadness at the idea of not observing the prohibition. Like I’ve said before, the practices of our avot v’imahot (“fathers and mothers”–our Jewish ancestors, basically) sometimes just get me right here. Right here in this instance being the Jew ‘fro waving in the wind, my kippah holding on for dear life, as I write this post on  a breezy 20th-floor balcony.

I’ll get a haircut today. At least that’s the plan. Otherwise I’ll wait until the end of the Omer. And by then, I’ll probably look like a Jewish Cousin It.

One thing that did go as expected, my perfect imperfection in using the counting of the Omer as a way to bring myself back to a more regular prayer practice. No, I haven’t davenned three times a day every day. Yes, often I’ve had to count the Omer in the morning instead of the evening. But I have used the rope of the Omer to pull myself closer to my goal, if the increasingly worn corners of my travel-size siddur are any indication.

Tomorrow that will hopefully continue to happen on my first good hair day in weeks. Baruch k’vod Adonai mim’komo. Blessed is the Glory of God in God’s place.

And the ‘do in its place, too.

If you want to piss off  blogger, take away their ability to blog. And lately, I have been one very definitely pissed off Jewish blogger. So, after three-and-a-half years, I’m dumping Clear Wimax. Four years ago, I was one of the early adopters of Clear Wimax service in Chicago. The wireless high-speed Internet service replaced AT&T DSL service that at the time was so spotty and slow, after making the switch, I destroyed my AT&T DSL modem with a hammer–on video, yet.

I’ve come to the conclusion you just can’t win with high-speed Internet service in a Chicago high-rise. During the eight years I’ve lived in Chicago high-rises, I’ve suffered through crappy third-party DSL, promising then disastrous AT&T DSL service, and now for the second time, on-again/off-again Clear Wimax service.

A bit of backstory, I almost never had Internet issues living closer to the ground, in Chicago or back in New York City. That’s a bit of a lie, actually, because I was also an early adopter of (the former Bell Atlantic) DSL service back in Brooklyn in the 1990s. The early service went out so often, I complained to state regulators, got two months of free service, and then promptly switched to cable-modem service from Time Warner Cable. At the time, I felt like you needed a seatbelt for the speed.

Arriving in low-rise Chicago in 2003, I immediately signed up for Comcast cable and cable-modem service. New verse, same as the first–for my first couple of years in Chicago, I continued to enjoy ridiculously fast and reliable Internet. (You will note this is not a blog post about cost, as no one would argue, least of all me, that high-speed Internet from your cable provider is cheap.)

And then I moved to the 38th floor of the east tower of Marina City. I wish I knew why Chicago high-rises seem to live in deathly fear of allowing themselves to be wired for modern cable service. In truth I know–because Windy City condo boards in older buildings tend to be cheap, or too poor, to want to pay for the rewiring projects that their often 1960s-era TV wiring would require.

So whether you live in a downtown Chicago residential tower, or somewhere in Chicago’s 20-mile lakefront mountain range of residential condos, your choices tend to be DirecTV (at best) and some slower-than-average, often reseller-supplied version of DSL. (What, you say? Your building has Verizon FIOS, or Comcast service? You are obviously the elite of Chicago’s lakefront liberals living in a top-tier building. Would you mind if Ryan and I come stay in your guest room? I’ll cook, he’ll clean, and we’ll all enjoy Roku service that never stutters. Trust me, my chopped liver is amazing.)

We had MDU at Marina City for DSL–as impossible to place the initials of the company as it often was to get hold of technical support when the Internet went out every other weekend in the mid-2000s. The only real other option was AT&T DSL service. Eventually, after a several day-long outage, I bit the bullet and returned to life as a DSL customer. Things were fine–for a while. Of course, that’s how they reel you in. But after the first couple of months, slow service and frequent outages became the norm once again. I sucked it up for a couple of years, flipped through the channels of my DirecTV while I was waiting for pages to load–and cursed every condo board member I encountered under my breath–because there just want any other choice.

And then Clear arrived on the scene. Back in 2009, the company was positioning itself as the over-the-air savior for a nation of wired high-speed Internet customers. The moment they got to downtown Chicago, out (so spectacularly) went the AT&T DSL modem, and on—next to my window–went the five steady lights of my shiny, new Clear Wimax modem.

Anyone who has ever been a Clear customer anywhere in America knows that the story could not possibly stop there with a happy ending.

It took only a few weeks for those five lights to become four, then three, then two, sometimes none, and that “fat pipeline” to become anemic-to-nonexistent, depending on the day. Hours spent moving the modem around the apartment did some good, but never for long. When Ryan and I moved to Edgewater last year, we were happy to learn that Clear had a better signal at our new home than at our old one–because of course, and yet again, the only television/broadband options at our new building, just like at Marina City, were DirecTV and AT&T.

We should have eaten crow and called AT&T sooner. But now, after 13 months of yet again on-again/off-again Clear service (ultimately, that second Clear honeymoon period didn’t last any longer than the first), we’re throwing in the towel. Especially after the past six months, when our Clear Wimax service declined almost to dial-up speeds (so much for using our Rokus!), and after the past two weeks when our service, depending on the hour, has sometimes disappeared entirely.

So after saying goodbye to my former AT&T DSL modem with a hammer four years ago, a new AT&T DSL modem arrives on Wednesday, and along with Ryan I’ll be back to my most-hated form of broadband Internet. Well, second most-hated after Clear, clearly.

It shouldn’t have been this way. Clear arrived on the scene with a lot of hubris and plans to be the country’s first and best 4G wireless broadband provider. Unfortunately, at the same time everyone else (Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) was developing second-generation LTE versions of 4G (LMGTFY). And as I groused shortly after signing up for Clear the first time, even when it was new, Clear–at least in Chicago (and for a time I had a Clear USB stick that allowed me to test the service out across the city and suburbs)–never lived up to its claims of unlimited, high-speed, video-quality Internet with any reliability.

I kept it so long because it was cheap and unlimited. Of course, you get what you pay for, and after all this time I’m pretty much left feeling I paid for three-and-a-half years of throttling as Clear struggled to provide the service it promised. Now that Sprint is upgrading its network, and finally turning off the old Nextel bandwidth, Clear is basically screwed. They originally co-located their Wimax transmitters in existing Sprint antenna locations (again, LMGTFY). As Sprint turns on its own LTE service and upgrades their old antenna locations, some Clear Wimax transmitters are being decommissioned entirely.

That appears to be what happened here in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood and in neighboring Rogers Park, where our area and several others this spring have become brand-new Clear dead zones–our former Clear towers simply disappearing entirely from Clear’s service map. Really? Really.

And really, the schmuck is me. I am the schmuck. I work from home and need reliable connectivity. That’s why Ryan and I carry unlimited data and voice on our phones. I should have made this decision much sooner.

So welcome back begrudgingly, AT&T DSL. Please do a better job this time.

And goodbye, Clear Wimax. You never, not once, lived up to your promises. You had more than your fair share of second chances, and still did your best to do me wrong. If you were an ex, I’d be cutting the crotches out of our pants and throwing your stuff off the balcony by now. I’ll be thrilled to see your lying lights blink off forever. Wednesday can’t get here soon enough. I wish you had a car for me to beat its headlights in and a momma to call and tell how you done me wrong. Now beat it.

Don’t make me get the hammer.