September 3, 2001
4:20 AM

Dear Diary,

I had the dream again. The one where it's Yom Kippur, and I’m beating my chest as I read one of those prayers that lists my sins in alphabetical order. Except in my dream, the prayer isn’t in Hebrew. It’s in Chinese, so it goes on forever, ‘cause there are like 20,000 letters in the Chinese alphabet, and my chest starts to ache from all of the pounding. Then my mother turns to me and tells me that my chest wouldn’t hurt if I wasn’t such a sinner.

Suddenly, I’m up on the bimah, holding a shofar. The whole congregation is staring at me.

I blow into the shofar. Nothing happens. I start to sweat. I blow harder, but I still can’t get any sound to come out.

Then everyone in the congregation rushes at me and tears me up into little pieces and carries me off to Lake Michigan and throws me into the water for tashlich.

Dr. A – my therapist - says that I have “High Holiday Performance Anxiety,” accompanied by something he called “acrosticphobia” – an unconscious fear of seeing things in alphabetical order.

I asked Dr. A what I should do about this. He said I should avoid dictionaries and phone books for three weeks.

I think I need to find a new therapist.