roaring twenties

Ten years is a long time. Given that, it’s really shocking I made it through my twenties without being offered cocaine even once. Granted, I was invited to join several book clubs, and that’s a little more my speed (no pun intended) anyway, but still. Unless I crank (no pun intended) up my nightclub attendance…More

thirty, hurty, and dying

In two months I’ll turn thirty. On Instagram, my friends are celebrating their own thirtieths with oversized 3-0 balloons and bachelorette-style nights out with sashes, recording lash-batting, foot-popping Boomerangs, with cute hashtags to boot. Meanwhile, I’ve got one foot in the grave and the other in an ergonomic clog. More

blue period

I remember vividly how the raw emotion of young adulthood, the wringer of heartbreak, betrayal, watching the US bomb the shit out of the Middle East, etc., gave way to realizing other people felt those emotions too, and that art was what they did to make them manifest.More

queen of the road

Ten minutes into my first solo trip as a licensed driver, I got stuck in a parking lot. I had chosen a spot in the corner that was open only because everyone else knew better than to try it, a fact I discovered when I started to back out and realized that there were cars…More

hej hej to all that

The Italian girls in my Danish class are beside themselves that I’ve left New York. “Jeg kommer fra New York,” I say, hacking up the “fra” like it’s 2003 and I’m in the front row of French I with Madame H________. Better to sound French than to sound American. “Then why are you here?” asks…More

putting away childish things

Adulthood, I think, is a matter of learning how to hold truths that contradict one another, because each truth was at one point valid. Every truth, in its own time and its own context, is how you become yourself.More

i contain multitudes of data

This is part 3 of an ongoing series about the Internet. Previously, I explored the positive role that social media can play in modern life and bemoaned how e-commerce has bastardized the art of writing. I don’t have future posts planned for this series, but stay tuned several years from now for my Silicon Valley…More

the medium is the message

This is part 2 of an ongoing* series about the Internet. Last week, I talked about how social media was my conduit to self-actualization (at least once I emerged from underneath the rock where I’d been hiding from Instagram for five years). This week, I counter that thesis by arguing that the Internet is a…More

pics or it didn’t happen

This post is the first in a two-part series about the Internet. In Part 1, below, I write a pages-long excuse for wasting all of my time on the Internet. In Part 2, I’ll illuminate the inseverable connection between trying to buy a mattress and the declining art of writing. Keep yourselves busy in between…More

these changes ain’t changing me

It occurs to me now that this story is wasted on the young. As a child, I found it overwrought. Then again, I was the kind of insufferable pedant who insisted on pointing out that I was ten and a half or turning thirteen next month. To me, the delta between just-turned-twelve and twelve-plus-eleven-months was…More