The following is a constellation of ideas and reflections, based on recent conversations with people I care about and influenced by several books, essays, and blogs I have read recently and in the past five years. I don’t want to drop names or structure this in a formal footnoted way, so if you recognize yourself […]
We waited east of the camp for our friends to show up, smoking cigarettes so familiarly in front of an unremarkable bar that was self-consciously empty. Striding up the blocks, four, three, two…military formations of riot police march up our sidewalk, going in our same direction. Stomach acid adrenaline and panic and now we are […]
Everything we do on a personal scaleTaking ‘we’ to mean everyone who ever existedIs the basis for everything wrong in this worldAnd of course everything are right as well. -Citizen Fish, “Small Scale Wars” This last six weeks has been an era, crammed into a collection of moments and meetings, distilled into a concentrate of […]
(from The Joke by Milan Kundera, quoted in Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich) I am not on the cutting edge of anything, which is why two important books that came out in the last year are suddenly on my mind now after a recent afternoon at The Strand: The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen & Gan Golan and Bright-sided: […]
“I’m done making plans. I’m just gonna see where the wind blows me,” is what my boyfriend casually said the other night, a little sentiment loaded with meaning beyond simple existentialism or wanderlust. We are recovering from a brief separation where, in a fit of emotional exhaustion, I declared that we would be better off […]
I am taking a lap around the office building where I am scheduled to participate in a ceremony whose elusive nature inspires the kind of frantic self-inventory and confusion typically reserved for the morning after a drunken one night stand: the second interview. I am 35 minutes early and looking to demonstrate confident punctuality rather than […]