Yesterday afternoon I hiked up to my favorite tree. Yes, out of all the trees in the world, I have chosen a favorite. It’s a very nice tree, with a perfect hollow for sitting and thinking and escaping the outside world. Its bark is rough but not prickly, which I’m sure you’ll agree is crucial [...]
I moved from California to New York when I was 18. I visited Manhattan for the first time on winter break during my senior year of high school. Separated from the group by a pair of rogue gloves and my need to retrieve them, I walked the streets of an unfamiliar city and thought, “Oh yeah. [...]
(Part 1 is here.) I make Rice-a-roni at 2 a.m. on a freezing February night. Our dorm’s poor ventilation becomes clogged with smoke that may or may not have poured from my pan. The fire alarm goes off and everyone troops out into the cold, grumbling. The firemen come. I grumble along with everyone else and hope [...]
Shrieking like an over-caffeinated hyena at midnight, eight hours before finals start. The entire campus troops out of the library onto the lawn or opens the nearest window to release a semester’s worth of frustration. The night echoes with howls. ~ Watching an episode of Ellen, the one with the first woman-woman kiss in television [...]
Stare blankly at the dollar bill you’ve just been handed. Be informed that it’s not for you, it’s for the girl on stage who’s actually earning it. (Because anyone who can do that with nipple tassles deserves a dollar.) Register your suspicion that the owner of the dollar bill really wants to do it himself [...]
Today was the perfect autumn day in New York. The sky was bright blue, the sun filtered through turning leaves to gild the street with gold, and the subway rerouted us somewhere we hadn’t intended to go. This place had cinnamon tea, shoe sales, and cobblestone streets. Someone will have to lure me onto the [...]
Having been raised on a steady diet of camping and Motel 6, staying somewhere with a terrace and brandy in a decanter makes me feel like a complete fraud. But since frauds get to drink brandy while tossing pencils off the balcony onto the heads of unsuspecting passersby, I’m totally on board with the fraud [...]
In half an hour we leave for the airport. This airport holds the plane that will lift us gently off the ground and deposit us in New York. In an amount of time that makes hardy, pioneering ancestors spit with disdain from under large, wiry moustaches before recounting the winter of ’66. Something about a [...]
I moved to the fashion capital of the world ten years ago in possession of two pairs of jeans, six t-shirts and one ugly winter coat. I don’t think I even knew what accessories were, much less how to use them. (Still don’t, but I’m no longer paralyzed by the idea that a necklace will [...]
Unable to go anywhere without junk food, we packed two bags of Cheetos, one bag of gummy bears, one tube of fruit gems, two bags of peanuts, one package of cookies and one concentrated dose of “How can you eat all this crap and remain so damn skinny while I increasingly resemble a walking potato [...]
