Simchat Torah

Simchat Torah, the end of the Yom Tov season, and usually a massive let down!
You see as kids Simchat Torah is the best day of the year, because you get to run around, and then you get to eat sweets, the sweets then make you run around more and eat more sweets, and this cycle continues ad nauseum climaxing with "mummy, i dont feel too good!"
so this idea of Simchat Torah being the best day of your life is projected onto every ST thereafter which is a problem when you are too old to run around and scramble on the floor for sweets, so you exchange it for booze and birds. but thats not as much fun, getting hold of booze can be tricky and girls are stupid. (throw stones at them) so every year you hope for a rocking ST and it never matches your expectations and you turn into an old man in shul, who wants hakafot to finish quickly, who wants there to be a decent single malt knocking around and wants to go home and sleep out the last yom tov for a few months.
ST became that for me, and then i started going to a Kiruv minyan, it is at one of the big names in Kiruv and its rocking. Alcohol is not flowing freely, there is a l'chaim to be had, but its all abuot the dancing. and the dancing is nuts. why, because you are with people who gave their lives for torah, looking around the room you see rabbis who have devoted their lives to spreading the good word and you see people who have literally given up the good life, to become an orthodox jew and when these people get a chance to dance, celebrating the one thing that defines their life, there is nothing else in the world that can match that.
there are other places which have a name of being "good" on ST, but they dont match it, they are good because there is a decent amount of people to shmooze with and there are good whiskeys, but that is't ST, it is what ST becomes when you miss the point.
and this year there was hakafot shniyot at the aforementioned kiruv minyan, and i went. admittedly i had danced for 24 hours straight and couldnt feel my feet but when the music came on, and the sifrei torah came out, we danced the night away.
next year look for a place where the people there prioritise torah and i guarantee that it will surpass all your childhood memories of running, jumping and sweet snatching!

Fasting

I know i am a bit behind, its was just something funny i noticed last night. I was sitting there and someone was eating some food next to me, and all i could think of was how that person could consume anymore food after two days of non stop eating. forget the four meals yuo had as standard, if you walked into anyone elses house they shoved food right infront of you and obviously, not wanting to offend you ate. so im sitting there yesterday, the smell of microwave pizza wafting towards me, and all i could think of, was never eating again! and i was thinking how exactly a week earlier i was sitting in shul at kol nidrei, thinking how i couldnt wait to eat. and then i realised something funny, something that i do every fast, i noticed how i always focus on what i could have eaten prior to the fast. i sit there thinking, "oh man, i should have had that slice of melon or that burger, it was just sitting there, nobody was having it....." but im sure loads of people do that.
what i want to know is, how far back do people go when dreaming about food, because this yom kippur i was thinking about food i should have eaten over the summer. i was thinking back to when i was in teaneck and how i should have bought the nachos, or how when i was in the local supermarket i should have bought some celery. i have wierd cravings.
it amused me slightly about how i was craving food from months earlier, which would have had zero effect on my fasting experience a long while later!