…Except I kind of was. I spent the last couple of years poring over articles and pictures of New York City. I read all kinds of guides for making your finances stretch and the best neighborhoods to live in and the hot spots to visit. I read listicles and blogs and books about the city- I mean, I even have a NYC coloring book! I think you could safely say I had done my research. So while these things didn’t surprise…
I sit at the table in the food court in Flushing, unfamiliar yet comforting smells and sounds swirling around me. Directly across from me sits a pretty young woman, earbuds in, absorbed in her reading as she deftly makes her way through her bowl of slippery noodles with her chopsticks. My own deftness is lacking, and I wince internally whenever I drop a particularly large noodle back into my soup, and glance at her surreptitiously to make sure I haven’t…
Well, here I am, tucked into my cozy little Airbnb room late at night, my first night alone in NYC. My lands, it has been a crazy past few weeks. I have found gray hairs all over my head (Well, I found one on each side and one in the middle, that counts as all over right? I mean, I’d only ever had one before that, so three new ones is a lot for me!) and I have basically spent…
So there’s something you should know… …In case you didn’t know already. It’s true- this pineapple is gonna go find some New York City stripes. And yes, I’m as surprised as you are. The whole thing is a massive series of surprising events for me. I’ve been dreaming about living in the city for so long that I’m pretty sure I won’t think it’s real until several weeks in when I’m sitting on my lumpy bed eating cabbage and nothing…
I’m sitting at my favorite local coffee shop- favorite because it’s actually open until a decent hour of the evening unlike most shops. I can loiter here till almost midnight if I please, which is just my cup of tea. And I’m having a cup of tea, or actually a whole pot of tea, and a double-chocolate cookie the size of my face to balance out all the healthy effects the tea might have on me. I’m a firm believer…
Everyone loves to make fun of a southerner in a snowstorm, myself included. Last night as I drove 35 mph on perfectly clear roads behind some anxious little person, kind thoughts were not first and foremost in my head, to be honest. And of course, there are memes galore about the inevitable bread and milk wipe out, and while nobody seems to understand why people buy those items, yet with each impending snow cloud, whoosh, the shelves are empty. Actually,…
Sometimes there are about a dozen things I want to tell you, but none of them are worthy of their own blog posts, so they sit in my head, gathering lint and fraternizing with their fellow baby ideas in there. The only way to fix this, since none of them can seem to develop into full-grown ideas, is to pile them all together and write you a chatty missive, seeing where the tide takes us. So here we go. First…
Can’t talk. Mid-hurricane. Gotta go find my Birkenstocks to float to safety. Talk to you next week.
Dear New York City, I first encountered you when I was a wee child, on my way to JFK to pick up my big brother from his endless stint in Ghana, Africa. It was only six weeks that he had been gone, but to my mind it may as well have been years. There was perhaps a fleeting and distant glimpse of Lady Liberty as we passed by, but my most vivid memory is sitting in the airport terminal, watching…
It was a dark and stormy night. And as Abby and Lyn and I are wont to do on such nights, we decided to take a walk. We may or may not have done this previously, and ended up walking miles in the drenching rain, but I guess history shows a little wetness doesn’t stop us. So off we sauntered, enjoying the gloam and the bursting rose bushes. We were walking in a line- I was bringing up the rear-…
Dearly beloved, sit down and I will tell you a story. Once upon a time, I lived in Honduras in a house made of adobe and clay tiles. The house was simply a long row of rooms side by side, with a porch on the back side, connecting all the rooms. The house also had two courtyards, separated by a wall and a door. While living there, we often had different stripes of young men come to stay with us…
Living with a roommate is taking a real chance. One one hand, you save loads of money as opposed to living alone, but on the other, having the wrong roommate could make your life miserable. There are plenty of horror stories floating around the internet of terrible roommates- people who steal your food and clog the shower drain and watch you when you sleep. And then there’s the second kind of roommate- someone with whom you live merely to save…