travel

re-contextualizing travel (with ghosts)

I finally found a natural counterbalance for all that dogged seeking. It didn’t matter if I was shopping in Scotland or sipping coffee in Savannah, the highlight of every trip was always the same, and somehow perfectly unique each time. Perhaps driven by a subconscious urge to recharge, I learned to ground myself with microdoses of actual human connection.

still

For three years I avoided stagnation by piling on more chaos, traveling, burning through my savings, ending up back at my parents’ house to let my bank account refill. Yesterday, I sent 50,000 carefully culled and crafted words to an editor with the intention of turning them into a book. Those two things could not have coexisted…

cool girl, bad habits

I was, I thought, cool. Not in the real effortless Paul Newman way we think of cool, obviously, but I believed that if I adorned myself with enough physical trappings of cool, I would absorb it by osmosis. Like the giant bug alien (Edgar) in Men in Black, I was wearing a cool suit. And just like Edgar, I was not pulling it off.