Mourning

I lost my first cat three months ago. It was a short but expensive and arduous process of googling everything possible (I'm an excellent googler) related to her illness/es, authorizing baffling tests and surgeries and medications, and the highs and lows of believing she would ultimately recover until the moment I woke up and discovered her body stiff next to me in the bed. She was a pet but she was my first real up close, personally responsible experience with death, and it was traumatic.

Grief is such an apt word for the feeling; it literally sounds how it feels. We buried her in my parents' backyard on Long Island and put a little wooden handwritten marker over it. The feeling of loss, emptiness and regret the last time I looked at her before closing the box still pops up in my head every now and then. In the supermarket I dread the pet aisle. It's been three months and we've left all of her cat towers and food bowls exactly where they always had been. Her medication is in the back of the cabinet, but I know it's there. I think of it less often now but I don't forget.

Guilt is a major factor, and self-recrimination. How I would have done things differently. I try not to dwell but it's impossible. I can't look at photos of the last trip we took before she got sick because they make me feel so selfish and irresponsible, because if I hadn't taken that trip, she would still be alive. I genuinely miss her, her posture, her chirps when I came home, her sighs.

The grief and sense of loss were also accompanied by a grim reminder of our own mortality. I feel much more aware of the fact that I am just an animal, and it's funny how you forget – all your trivial anxieties and ambitions and fears pale in the sense of scale of how many animals since the beginning of time have lived and died. I've always been fascinated by history, and now every time I see something from the past all I can think is that the person who wrote or painted or built this is dead. I'll be dead. Everyone I know will die and the earth will keep churning along and creating new animals and people who will also forget that they will die...until they do, or someone they love does. There's something that feels so unfair and uncompromising about this, but also in a small way, like a kind of cosmic justice. I don't think I'm morbidly depressed but I can see the appeal in existentialism. It does take a lot of the self-imposed pressure a person could feel when they consider that they are basically a genetic lottery of competitive, life producing cells. We're all a bunch of statistics, similar to the story of how predator birds will have two babies knowing one will have to die because they can only care for one, but that the odds for survival are increased with two. Many of us will have to be thrown away before our time. If you don't reproduce, are you a waste?

On the bright side, it's encouraged me to see a doctor and get on blood pressure medication.

Traveling

I love every place I've been.

I loved camping as a kid. My family didn't have a lot of money and we would go cabin camping often. I loved sleeping in an itchy sleeping bag on a hard cot for some reason. The novelty of something different was so exciting. Sometimes we would sleep in a tent in our backyard, and I loved that too.

I love Rome. A giant city with the entirety of its history in every stone. I loved Florence, the squares, the coffee, the food. I loved Bologna, its quiet and everyday volume, free of tourists. I loved the soft pasta, and the lilting language. I even loved Venice, even though they hung a hideous billboard of Kate Moss over the basilica. I loved Sorrento, nobody could not love Sorrento, riding a scooter at night over the cliffs and feeling the wind on your face and the twinkling cruise ship lights in the water. I loved Capri, the pizza, the water. The pizza in Capri was so good that when I took my first bite I was shocked. I love Italy.

I love Ollantaytambo. I loved the rustic, woody smelling hotel we stayed in attached to the train station. I loved the creak on the floorboards as you walked and the funny looking flowers in the garden. I loved trying to spot the faces of the gods in the mountains. I loved Cusco and the hawkers, the rooftop restaurants, their odd obsession with pizza. I loved the little mummified girl who lived her entire life only to be sacrificed. I loved the painful reverence they built their cathedrals with, in this colonial style that was so alien to them. I loved Arequipa, its palm trees, having breakfast on the roof. I loved the avocado sandwich I had in the airport hotel in Lima. I love Peru.

I love Reykjavik, how you never have to lock your house or car door because there's no crime. I loved the sliced hard boiled eggs in every sandwich. I loved how there were no trees, because the Vikings cut them all down for fuel and light, and how when Iceland started to try and propagate trees again they planted them in weird lines and squares. I loved the spotlessly clean gas stations and hobbit homes built into hills. I loved spotting tiny white fluffs of sheep, and all the different kinds of stones and rocks that were once lava. I loved the glacier lagoon so much, when I saw Vatnajökull I almost cried. I love Iceland.

I love Bogotá, its sprawling, dusty energy. I loved that malls are in their heyday there. I loved bandeja paisa, the "country platter" that literally was supposed to sustain you for an entire day. I loved having so much avocado and how shiny my hair became. I loved that they have a museum devoted to gold and the thousands of years we have been obsessed with it. I loved Medellín's progressive approach to city planning and ecological conservation, and I loved the exotic, jurassic greenery of the foliage that surrounded it. I loved ajiaco and mojarra and the street stalls. I loved the isolation of isla Barú, the medieval architecture of Cartagena, and the friendliness of the locals I met in the tattoo shop. I love Colombia.

I love Honolulu, how everyone there is the most American Asian person I've ever seen. I love the touristy surf culture. I loved how pervasive east and southeast Asian culture/cuisine is. I loved the low humidity and blinding sun. I loved loco moco, the mash up of so many different things into something so new but so familiar. I loved Kauai's Napali coast, the canyons, the chickens. I loved bicycling along the coast line and feeling the sun march its way across the sky so you eventually got evenly tanned all over. I love Hawaii.

There's more but I'll stop here, because I'd go on forever. I need to travel again. I'll miss my cats and home when I do.

In Cold Blood

Right now I'm rewatching In Cold Blood, the film about Truman Capote's novel on the murders of a innocent ranching family. I haven't read the novel and don't know if it would be possible (emotionally) for me to, but I understand the controversy around the subject matter all while I'm reminded what a superb story it is. Truman Capote was right. Nobody wants "monsters" humanized, and it was an incredible risk and artistic achievement to attempt it. If someone murdered someone from my family or a loved one I would want blood, immediately. But the power of our shaky social contract, where if you violate the code of the tribe and are rightfully expelled, is still as surprising to me as  the power of chemistry in connecting on some level with each other. It's also a testament to our skill as storytellers, how we can weave this simplicity into our real-life, complex situations, where we can reduce someone who might have been a victim of abuse their entire lives to an inhuman monster to maintain our own narratives of the "right" way to be passing time. Our own experiences are never as linear as any "story" until after the fact. Or maybe it is so simple as that, and we make it overly complicated?

Anyway, I like the movie. It makes me feel empathy that I didn't feel before, and I think that's an important feeling to be capable of having.

Colorado!

We're going to Colorado for the first time!

I absolutely love Kayak's explore function. It's great if you have a budget/schedule preference, but not a location preference for your next trip. As far as I know, it's the only travel site that offers something like that. And as a freelancer, whose life is mostly determined in two to three month blocks of time, it's a wonderful way to find new places to travel to.

I used to be prejudiced against traveling within America when I worked full-time. With only ten days off per year, it seemed kind of like a waste for some reason, beyond taking long weekends here and there upstate or to beaches. We broke that streak with our last trip to Hawaii, which was probably more of an easing into American travel considering it's a zillion miles away and a tropical country, so now I feel ready for this.

Know Thyself

With Oscar season around the corner, I've been trying to catch up on all the top picks for Best Picture.
My favorites are Birdman and Whiplash. These two deal with similar themes – the path that you go down to acquire some kind of skill, talent, or recognition; the sacrifices and challenges that go along with any kind of success with it; and how to cope during moments of real or even perceived loss of that. I think anybody in a competitive, creative field can identify particularly well with these stories. The self-doubt, the soaring highs when you succeed, and the crippling lows when you fail, and how quickly they can appear or even coincide.

Both main characters were attempting to bend themselves into roles that did not come naturally, and were suffering for it. Trying to carve the lumpy, imperfect you into the version you think you should be, whether it's for career, success, happiness or whatever, is pretty much the definition of ambition. Isn't that what makes greatness? Something about you was lacking before – by determination and sheer willpower, you can have it. It's a catalyst for change, for progress into something better.

I wonder how I would have viewed these ten years ago, when I was dripping with enthusiasm and motivation and hopeful visions of the future. Now that I'm older, I can also see in them characters that don't know themselves, who they are or what their limitations are. They're taking risks beyond what they were capable of, which in America is usually considered a noble and worthy risk to take, unless you fail miserably. But if you think about it, couldn't many people succeed one in a million times if they gave up on everything else and forced themselves day and night at it? 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. It just means you worked harder than everyone else, and honestly, I've grown to feel that it's not always worth it anymore. I lived that way for ten years and I was miserable. I stopped and now I'm happier. Life is short.

I find it surprisingly easy to shake off these never-ending analyses nowadays. It's become much simpler. Am I OK, or miserable? OK = continue. Miserable = change something. It's a little sad when I'm reminded of the way I used to be through movies or other people, but I also do not miss it at all. My ghost chasing days might be over for good. I remember always hearing people say "I wasn't happy" when talking about giving up on something, and I used to feel pity for them, because I was happy doing what I loved. Now that I can see how much I lied to myself for so long, everything is much more clear.

Frugal Living

One of the many things that changed once I made the leap from working full-time to freelance was the way I view and use my income. Working full-time, the steady paycheck was nice but living in New York with a New York lifestyle meant I was living paycheck-to-paycheck. Saving was always a challenge, and vacations and other cost-of-living benefits were usually at least partially subsidized by credit card debt. I carried a balance on all five of my credit cards and felt constantly like I was barely treading water. A lot of this was my own fault – I allowed myself to be financially irresponsible because I felt so overworked and drained that I "rewarded" myself with going out, buying new things, and blowing money whenever I felt like it.

The shift into taking more control of my life and finances coincided also with some personal growth where I really tried to take a look at myself and why I was so unhappy. I saw a therapist, I began meditating and tried to get in touch with the sense of self I had lost in the past few years. Not to sound too new-agey, but once the change happened and the thorn was removed, I was able to heal surprisingly fast. I've lost a lot of the desperation I used to feel of constantly never having enough. My income comes much more sporadically, but I've been fortunate enough to pay off all my debt in the past year, and also save much more without the constant desire to buy something or go out to fill the hole I used to feel. I've been able to set personal goals for once beyond taking a vacation in six months, like buying a home or starting my own business, which always seemed completely out of reach.

The first month I wasn't working, I stayed in and ate everything in the house – canned soups, pasta, toast. I renegotiated our cable bill down and began trying to minimize, donating clothing and getting rid of some of the crap that I'd been blindly accumulating. In my spare time, I searched online for more tips on this new lifestyle I was trying to embark on, and discovered the huge community of individuals minimizing and living "frugally," and even on the further end of the spectrum, homesteading or living off the grid.

Being self-sufficient is incredibly addicting! I've fantasized about growing my own food, learning how to create things I need, and waste less. I try to learn new skills in my down time. I go out less often. I repair damaged clothes/shoes instead of tossing and replacing them. I find myself checking the per unit prices when grocery shopping and spending more time comparison shopping. I still slip up from time to time but have lost most of the obsessive compulsion to chase things that I used to have – instead I try and channel that energy into this new and healthier outlet, and I'm so grateful to have found it. I feel much more in control of more aspects of my life, and have less anxiety about the things I can't control. I feel free.

Hawaii!

Still a bit jet-lagged, but back from Hawaii! I haven't gone through all my photos yet, but a few thoughts:

1. Hawaii doesn't have ebola, NYC does – Hawaii 1, NYC 0.
2. Hawaii has as many churches as beaches.
3. Honolulu has a LOT of Japanese tourists.
4. Spam is not meant to be eaten every day.

Sailing up my dirty stream: still I love it and I'll dream...

- Pete Seeger, 'My Dirty Stream (the Hudson River Song) 

I've been heading upstate nearly every weekend for the past couple months. It started last spring and has continued more and more frequently as time went on.

I'm officially hooked! As a born and bred New Yorker, "The Country" was something that took me a while to appreciate. When I was seven and visited an uncle in Middletown, it was drowsy carsickness. In high school it was the boondocks. In college it was hunters and God-fearing people that ate instant potatoes, or else batshit hippies in tie-dyed shirts who never showered and lived in the past. Isn't it weird how the same things can be so different to one person depending on what phase of your life you're in?

I don't know what to call this phase of my life since, like most people, it won't make sense to me until years later. Maybe like, the "something's changing but I don't know for what end or how to get there" phase. I quit my full time job and took my career into my own hands – but for how long? And what's next? It's not possible for me to worry about it right now. I'm not married and although in a committed relationship do not plan for marriage or for kids – but is that sustainable? I physically can't think about it now, I'm busy looking at this frog on this lily pad. It could be the meditation, or the ayahuasca, or the various disappointments or humiliations suffered in every other aspect of normal social life, but I hit a point where I realized I could take all of these and sort of shelve them while I go look at woodpeckers for an hour and by the time the woodpeckers go to bed, nothing else really seems to matter anymore. 

One thing I can't get over, as a city mouse, is just how soft everything looks. In my head, I completely understand that if I ran into a wooded area I would get scratched left and right by twigs, maybe stung by some kinds of unfriendly insects, or impaled on a split branch. But when I just look at trees they look soft and fluffy and comfortable. It's a completely different visual experience than living in a city where everything is made of brick and concrete and steel, and what you see feels impossible to compromise with. You work around them. In the country, you can walk slowly and the leaves won't bite. Someone should study this.

The Vine of the Dead: The Work I did

Three days ago, on Thursday, I took Ayahuasca in a group with nine strangers and a shaman.

I had heard more and more about it in the press – Marie Claire, the NY Times – but I always assumed it was something that would I wouldn't come across. I had already gone to Peru and other parts of South America, and was clueless that it even existed. I certainly wasn't going to go back down to South America to trip, and I was OK with that. Then, a friend who was doing his own personal journey throughout the continent emailed that he did it, and loved it, and I got the very first twinge of envy.

My biggest weakness is envy. I am constantly afraid of missing out on something, and it has led me to some reckless and impulsive decisions. But that envy can also be helpful, because it builds and drives me to focus, something that is usually fairly difficult for me, so that when the opportunity arises I'm ready to jump on it. When that same friend returned home and texted me last week that he knew a shaman visiting who had some open spots, I was ready.

I felt a little nervous when I received The Diet email, which forbade meat, any dairy or other animal products, fruit, caffeine, salt, sugar, or anything preserved. It also forbade alcohol and sex. The point, the email explained, is to experience this ascetic deprivation in order to prepare you to commune with The Plant Teacher. I did my best (with a couple of slip ups) for the days leading up to it, feeling buzzier and more alert than I have in months. I was hungry all the time, but it was easy to keep my ultimate goal in mind.

I felt slightly more regret, walking into a small, hot apartment in a faraway (by New York standards) neighborhood, and while meeting the shaman and his wife, who looked like what an inexperienced casting agent would cast as hippie-types. I felt even more when I realized that every other person in the group was a man. They were all ages and types, the only common theme being their open, easy friendliness. But I still wondered what I had got myself into.

The shaman walked us through what felt like a long, boring botany class. His wife saged us individually as we prepared to drink the small shot glasses. The first was like a strong, medicinal Chinese tea. The second was what I imagine eating silica gel would be like. (When I drank it, I turned to my friend and said "It's like drinking silica gel!" and he laughed at me and asked how I knew what silica gel tastes like.) It felt like someone had stuck an industrial strength vacuum tube inside of my mouth, and I was grateful for the glass of water the shaman's wife provided us with.

I was told it takes about an hour to kick in, but if I had to estimate it was less than fifteen minutes before I got sick. I felt an incredible heaviness on my chest and the uncontrollable urge to throw up. I tried to breathe deeply and meditate but I couldn't overcome it, so I grabbed my bucket (we were asked to bring our own puke buckets!) and I threw up. I remember being surprised how much you could throw up when you've fasted for ten hours. I wondered if this was a mistake – I didn't feel cleansed, I just felt nauseous, achey and sick, as if I had food poisoning.

There was a fan in the room, and the low click-click-click as it oscillated started to do something to my vision. When I closed my eyes, I saw a glowing, grid-like net that jerked along with the fan's sound. Things began animating out of the grid, which quickly escalated to the most visual experience of my life – scenes upon scenes seemed to be happening all over the insides of my eyelids, which had suddenly become like an infinite iMax screen. Animals, violence, laughter, families. I felt like someone was pulling my eyelids shut when I tried to open them, and I felt the first sense of The Other: "LOOK AT ALL OF THIS!" it seemed to be shouting. "Do you see??"

I want to be able to explain it better but I don't think it's possible. I will say there were definitely three distinct phases: The first was the visions. Not to be hyperbolic, but I felt as if I saw millions of visions. There was so much to see, and none of it was scary at all – I felt an incredible sense of calmness, and more curiosity and fascination, with what I was seeing. I saw a lot of hands. The hands spoke in a type of sign language, and I understood them all. I scratched my shoulder at one point, and the hands pointed at my shoulder. It felt like I was being shouted at by millions of voices. They were so excited I was there and were all desperate to show me things.

Then, out of this cacophony came the sense of another being, an important one. It felt like a woman. I didn't see her, or hear her voice, but I felt her, and I heard her. "Do you want me to show you something?" she seemed to ask, over and over again.

At first I was nervous. I opened my eyes, and I saw the room I was in, and the visions stopped. She didn't like this, and before long, this method stopped working. I saw the visions whether my eyes were opened or closed. Finally I gave in, and she began showing me the things, many things that I don't even feel comfortable talking about yet.

This began the second phase, where I regressed into a whiny baby. I had had questions prepared to meditate on: "What should I do with my life? What's next for me?" but in the actual moment, where she was there to answer me, all of my questions seemed so silly. The questions got simpler. "Who am I?" I whined. "What comes after life?" I asked and asked and asked, more questions than I even knew I had, and she answered. I asked what my spirit animal was, and she laughed at me. I asked what color my aura was, she showed me. It was purple.

This Q&A session was intermittently interrupted by a particular vision she would show me to make her points. At one point I had had enough. It was too much. I wasn't ready for all of this, I couldn't process it. I felt like I had been there for days, I was exhausted, and I had to work the next day. I opened my eyes and saw the room, came back to reality, and checked my phone. Forty minutes had passed, and ayahuasca usually lasts 4-8 hours. I was in it. It was too late.

When I ran out of questions, she and everyone else continued to show me things. I understand now why they call it the Plant Teacher. It felt as if I was being taught by millions of souls desperate to show me something. They were competing with each other, but I could understand all of them at the same time. I wasn't me anymore. I tried to take notes and she blurred out my writing and then my pens ran out of ink.

The third phase was the quietest. I suppose it would be the come-down, but I was still learning. The visions had subsided, but I still felt the presence of the Others. They were all still talking to me, comforting me, embracing me. We're all in this together, they seemed to say. You are not alone.

It was, without a doubt, the hardest, most powerful, and most meaningful night of my life. I slept three hours that night and woke up feeling like how a sick person who was suddenly cured must feel the first morning. I felt healed and new and perfect. Something had happened to me, and I did not ever want to go through that again.

It's only been three days now, but that's worn off. I want to learn more.

Nostalgia

I saw an article in Gothamist this morning about a guy who robbed (for the second time in his life!) a Stride Rite store in New Jersey. I hadn't realized Stride Rite still exists. When I was a kid growing up in suburbia, Stride Rite was the strip-mall children's shoestore of choice that my mother would haul me to whenever I needed fancy patent-leather shoes. I remember how every single time back then, I had to put my foot in the little metal foot-measuring thing, and then being surprised as a teen when my feet stopped growing and I didn't need to anymore.

I had an American Girl doll then, too. Samantha Parkington. I once read she was discontinued, and thoughtlessly regretted not still having her to put up on eBay. I was reminded again recently when a friend sent me a Gawker article about the tourist-trap store in the city, which kind of surprised me, because it was another of those things I just assumed went the way of Popples and Skip-it and other things from my childhood that don't exist anymore. This is Samantha:

She's from the turn of the century, and the "stock" version of her came with a little velvet hat, a doll-sized locket, a coin purse, a handkerchief, and a copy of her first book. I had to pick her because she was the closest looking doll to me (brown hair; back then there were only three options, and none of them Asian. Now there are a zillion).

Each girl, from different historical periods in time, came with a series of books about her adventures, and along with that, somewhat historically accurate-ish accessories you could buy. I never got any accessories – the doll herself took months of wheedling and soul-destroying piano practicing to get for one Christmas/birthday gift – but that's where the real racket is, sort of like iTunes for the iPod. Actually I'm incredibly jealous that I didn't think of this, it's a great merchandising idea and I love history.

I read all the books, but I think I played with the doll for a couple months and forgot about her.

That's the funny thing about nostalgia. Something that wasn't even really a big deal at the time can dig its way into your psyche and hang on, forgotten about, until something pulls on it and opens a floodgate of memories. I remember the surprise when my mother let me open my gift on Christmas Eve, and feeling sort of disturbed by the laxness of her rules about holiday gift opening. I remember being disappointed by the plasticky smell of the doll, and how itchy her velvet hat was. Her shoes were cheap and hard to squeeze onto her weird doll feet, and I felt tricked and dismayed, but had to pretend to be ecstatic because I knew how difficult it was for my parents to save the money for the stupid doll. It was one of the first times in my life I remember realizing that just because you want something, doesn't guarantee it'll live up to your expectations when you get it. And if other people are involved, sometimes you have to swallow your disappointment and move on.

I did continue reading all the books, though. Nobody can really ruin your imagination for you, and there were some good educational lessons in them about tolerance and change and loss. Looking back, I'm thankful even for the disillusionment. It probably helped me in coping with other, more adult-level disappointments later on.

Medicinal Korean soup

With this crazy neverending polar vortex end-of-the-world weatherpocalypse, the absolute worst thing imaginable happened to me: I got sick.

I never catch colds. Until recently, I haven't been full-blown sick for over TWO YEARS. Closer to two and a half. I get very short-lasting and debilitating fevers once in awhile, what with the hypertension and all, but usually these are less than 24-hours. This time, I was laid up a week and still have a bit of a cough.

I am a huge baby when I get sick, like many, but luckily have been able to hide out at home and avoid embarrassing myself out in public like the last time I was sick when I caught some deathly bronchial infection from my niece, who was a baby then. She's a toddler now, for frame of time reference.

To survive, I made pots and pots of soup, which lasted me weeks because the feverish kind of sick I was always makes me lose my appetite. One of my favorites is this monster-vitamin-fest Korean soup that's both super easy and convenient. Cooking with Korean ingredients is a cinch because everything's either dried or frozen fresh and basically lasts forever. I mean, I don't really know how long things are going to last in the freezer, and I eat them usually when I'm sick, and I never get sick! So I'm still alive. Who are you going to believe?

MY MEDICINE SOUP STOCK

This may seem like a lot of ingredients, but for most of them, once you have them in your freezer/cupboards, you're set for years. It takes less than an hour and you can make smaller batches so they don't go bad when you get sick of it and have to order a cheeseburger on seamless.

2-4 quarts water
Dried anchovies (similar to these on amazon, they freeze and last forever)
Dried kombu/kelp seaweed (the hard square ones you get in ramen)
Dried shiitake mushrooms
Dried Korean seaweed (similar to this on koamart, I think you can use wakame too)

Soup soy sauce (on koamart – maybe regular can be used, but use way less)

Sesame oil

Garlic

Ginger

1. Start boiling the water. Take a handful the mushrooms and the squiggly seaweed each, and throw them in a bowl to soak. The squiggly seaweed doubles in size, but the mushrooms stay about their wrinkly selves.

2. Throw a few of the squares of kombu into the water, and a few of the anchovies. Because I'm squeamish, I pull off the heads and take out the little black guts part thats attached to them, so only the bodies go in, but I don't think that part's necessary.

3. By the time the water's boiling, the mushrooms and squiggly seaweed should be rehydrated. Dump their soaking water and throw them in the pot. Add sliced garlic and ginger (I hate ginger so I only put a couple slices, but it's supposed to be amazing for your immune system.)

4. Leave the soup for about 20-30 minutes at a medium boil, then add the soy and sesame oil. Also start to sea salt for taste. Should be pretty good by now.

You can eat it at this point, but I like to fish out the kombu and anchovies and add things like frozen rice cakes (the little round ones), whisked eggs, tofu, rice or noodles. You can also add any kinds of hot sauce and turn it into something else – kimchi soup, tofu soup, anything. Or you could make it completely vegan and leave out the anchovies/egg and it still tastes amazing. 

Her

I'd been on the fence about Her for a few reasons, the main one being that when testing the plot against the one sentence summary (man falls in love with his operating system), it honestly sounded not interesting to me as a premise, and also kind of ridiculous and cheap. The concept of how we "love"/depend on our technology too much has been debated to death and I was bored of that conversation. Or, so I thought!

If you haven't seen it, I would even recommend not watching the trailer or even listening to anyone else talk about it. I managed to avoid it through a combination of being sick and homebound for awhile, and went in with medium- to low expectations. I mainly went to kill a night, and also because there are certain directors (Coen bros, Tarantino, Wes Anderson) where you kind of force yourself to go as a creative and then are pleasantly surprised. I'd been disappointed by Where the Wild Things Are, his last big film, and was prepared for a torturously slow, overly wrought film with forced poignant silences and a lot of wistful gazing off into space.

To be fair, for some people this film might have felt like it had all those things, but I was completely blown away. Especially knowing that Spike Jonze wrote the entire script. I used to have a pretty illogical dislike of Jonze (WHY does he spell his name like that? And why was he so dismissive to Sofia Coppola in Lost in Translation?? Why was Where the Wild Things Are so boring???)

But Jonze pulled a fast one on us, and made the first really deeply philosophical film I've seen in long, long time on the most universal questions of the world: What is life? What is love? When you love someone, why is it so hard to give, and when you need love, why is it so hard to get? Why are we so destructive?

Obviously I spent most of the movie crying, but it also was surprisingly funny. And it wasn't just the writing, the whole thing worked together beautifully for me. The story, which I assumed would be trite and overdone, was nuanced and compelling and fascinating for me to wonder what would happen next. The future-ish setting felt very restrained, and the art direction of the sets, the colors, the framing, I loved everything. I loved the camera work and editing, which is something that only nerdy wannabe filmmakers/critics say, but I'd felt especially moved by the camera work in Breaking Bad recently and have started paying more attention to that kind of thing. I'm bummed Joaquin didn't get an Oscar nom.

Anyway, that's a lot to say about a movie, I have even more but am restraining myself. I'm glad I forced myself to go out and see it, and even though I'm in a completely unrelated industry, that kind of attention to detail and plain old hard work that can create something which transcends "work" into something else, is something I need to be reminded of every day.

Cool Fatigue

I feel like there should be a real name for this condition, but the best I've been able to come up with lately is Cool Fatigue. I've felt it every time an idea I'd had in the past launched as a fully funded app, or especially when an idea I'd never thought of launches, and is an instant hit. One of the hardest parts about working in tech is just the sheer amount of HOW MUCH cool stuff is happening constantly: how many cool ideas are out there, how great they look or function, and how many people are doing them faster than you.

This is all fine and motivational normally, but a weird thing started happening to me with some pretty real negative consequences. I felt defeated. I wanted to give up. And worse than that, I started to feel annoyed and repulsed by everything. Do we really NEED this much convenience? Is it going to make us happier? Isn't it all at some point just an egotistical way to "win" in a hyper-competitive environment about who can plan the most moves ahead of everyone else into a check-mate? I mean, WHAT'S THE POINT???

This kicked off the beginning of a kind of technological withdrawal, something I know isn't unique to me. Designers everywhere are going back to their more primitive, hand-made roots, yearning for camping gear, working with their hands, and any other forms of rugged simplicity. I bought the entire Little House series (for about 1¢ each on Amazon, I'm not giving up that much technology) and read them all in a month. I started little craft projects on pieces of furniture I already owned, painting and sanding and organizing. And instead of spending weekends partying, I tried to get out of town more and more often, back into nature and to breathe fresh air and feel alive.

This is basically a long segue into a particularly helpful weekend of recuperation, a week after our eleven (!) year anniversary. We found an incredible little house in Barryville NY called Hillside Schoolhouse. It's hard to call it a b&b because the owners don't actually stay in the same property, which is great. It's beautifully done in a very Brooklynized former logging town along the Delaware River, about two hours northwest of the city.

The owner had a pretty good record collection.

Even the general store was Williamsburgy!

We spent the weekend hiking, eating in surprisingly expensive restaurants in the area, and exploring. The day we left we stopped by Storm King. The whole weekend had been intensely foggy and damp but it hadn't rained at all, which was great and left Storm King pretty empty.

I think many of us can lose perspective living in the city. (And maybe everybody already knows this, but I just figured it out.) It's so easy to lose track of your life, of who you are, and what you even want. Without taking any moments to yourself to recharge, to re-center and balance, you can spin out of control. There was a point where I thought that that spinning on the brink of a breakdown gave me a rush of being actually in control, but now looking back I can see so clearly that it was all just an illusion. Or even worse, a delusion. I was never in control. But I'm glad that I found a way to start to get some back. 

Roofies are an inappropriately funny thing to joke about with your closest friends until you've been roofied

OK SO. Obviously I don't know with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY 100% that I was roofied, but I am pretty sure based on  my problem solving and critical thinking skills. Here are the facts:

1. I drink a lot. Like, every day. It's not something I'm proud of (maybe a little) but that's fact 1. An average night going out, I can put away 7 or 8 drinks. Of course there are times that I get sloppy or something, but I NEVER BLACK OUT. I can always get home. Last night, I had four drinks that I remember, which honestly is roughly the amount that makes me slightly more sociable.

2. I was at a show of a band I love and had been looking forward to seeing, which I missed because I became unconscious.

3. I literally remember everything super clearly up until one point where I completely do not remember anything after that.

4. I was alone at one point getting a drink while my boyfriend held our spots, in the break between the second opener and the main act. I do not remember anything after this.

5. I had plans with friends after the show, and I always try not to flake. I hate flakes.

This morning I woke up and realized my contacts were still on my eyeballs. This was a very startling thing, because I'm panicky about eyeball health (it's my moneymaker) and I always, always remember to take out my contacts no matter what. I immediately got up and took them out and had that wtf moment where I thought, What happened last night??

My boyfriend woke up around this time and proceeded to fill in the gaps for me. I came back upstairs after buying my last drink, where I got very belligerent and embarrassed him. I wobbled and bumped into people. I got loud, rookie drunk. He dealt with it for a few minutes before I confided in him that I GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE. He became anxious and tried to navigate me out of the venue where I tried to lie down on the sidewalk outside and passed out. The bouncer tried to help him with me and he hailed a cab, picked me up off the sidewalk, and put me in it. I'm completely unconscious already. He carried me out of the cab, into our apartment, and put me in bed, and tried to wake me up – I did not wake up. He considered calling an ambulance but the no insurance thing was a factor so he just let me sleep.

Being all detective-y, we tried to piece it together. He said my last drink, a neat whiskey, looked a funny color, and he noticed it, but didn't say anything. It happened extremely quickly. I was alone for long enough for someone to maybe think I was at the show by myself.

The feeling I feel most is PISSED OFF. I missed the show. I live in a neighborhood where people will roofie you. I have never paid any attention to my drinks because I never thought I had to, I liked the neighborhoody vibe of Williamsburg where bars aren't a scene and people look out for each other. I don't get hit on in bars, we don't get in fights. It's not fucking Manhattan. But I guess it is now and that really, really pisses me off. I feel tense and violated and under attack, like when someone once made a racist comment to me in a Dumbo bar – I'm reminded that I'm a girl, which is a thing I'd really rather forget.

Escape from NY

Last weekend, some friends and I rented a house on airbnb, upstate in a small town 20 minutes from Woodstock. We stayed three nights, without wifi and usually without 3G, and spent the time finding swimming holes, in the pool, grilling on the charcoal grill, and drinking hundreds of beers.

It was odd how much fun the simplest things were; throwing rocks into a river; lighting and watching gas lamp; a card game; saving a frog from the pool. The city constantly feels like there's not enough of anything – we're all in desperate search for more fun, more interesting work, more friends, more love, more alcohol, more everything. Something about being away from that relentless discoverer mode, in the quiet woods with only the bullfrogs and crickets and leaves rustling made it possible to isolate and find small joy in things that would ordinarily bore us to death.

We figured out both the VCR and DVD player. It was kind of fun to see how people used to have to deal with terrible, terrible UX.

We also headed up to Woodstock for one of their outdoor weekend festivals, which was amazing. The tiny pocket of a town felt like what would happen if you took Williamsburg and aged it by 40 years. We talked about how for us growing up, 40 years ago was the 60's. Now it's the 80's, our childhoods with synthesizers and mohawks and puffy lettering on sweatshirts. All these things are probably as foreign to today's youth as peace signs and headbands on boys were to us.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is. Overall it was an enlightening trip, and helped make an already overly tight-knit group of friends closer enough to send off one of our own to his new job in San Francisco. There were stick-and-poke tattoos, there were tears (mostly related to the tattoos), there was the thrill of climbing onto a big rock overlooking a fast moving river. I think it was a success.

Meditation on meditation

Last week, I attended a peer-led sit in at New York Insight Meditation Center. My friend Jack worked at Founder Collective in the same building, which was how he discovered it, and he recommended it to me one night over drinks while I was emotionally imploding. 

Each day has drop-in hours, but Tuesdays and Thursdays have guided sittings for two hours, 7-9pm. Tuesdays are the beginner classes, but they're more formal and structured. I had never meditated before and was a little concerned about my lack of impulse control, so we went to the more informal Thursday sitting.

The experience was totally different than what I was expecting. First off, I was great at it! I was instantly capable of shutting down my brain. Listening to the guide's recommendations for beginners felt like the easiest thing in the world. Afterwards I was even a little alarmed because I could suddenly see how people get brainwashed – there's something incredibly comfortable about giving up autonomy and responsibility. It's such a relief, almost like a little brain vacation.

At first, just sitting in the silent room with all the strangers, I focused on my breathing in and out and listened. There was the hum of the air conditioner, the dim, barely audible music from a dance class across the street, the breathing of the other attendees. There was the feeling of palms beginning to sweat on my knees, so I turned my hands over. I could feel my heartbeat – I have an abnormally high resting heart rate, around 100 BPM, and I could suddenly in all that silence only feel the strain of that overworked muscle, imagining the blood flowing out into my arms and legs and up to my brain. 

At one point early on, my eyes began rapidly twitching under the closed lids. As per the guide's recommendation, I let them go, not trying to stop them, and became aware of when they began to calm down, till the point where they stopped completely. I checked in on my heartbeat and it was slower than I had ever felt it. Eventually I couldn't detect the beat at all.

Then the strange part happened! I suddenly became aware of feeling like I was floating. It was like when you smoke just the right amount of pot to be really stoned but not scared yet, or almost that too drunk feeling when your brain is just spinning and gravity doesn't pull on you and you aren't afraid or agitated by it, but happy and enjoying it. There is no thought in your head at all except how good you feel. 

Someone got up, and the wooden floors creaked. I felt snapped back into that room, with those strangers, and suddenly my heartbeat was pounding in my chest again. I breathed slowly in and out and tried to go back there.

The first 45 minutes of sitting were just like that, dipping in and out of this mental fun zone. Afterwards, there was walking meditation, partner meditation, and a weird group therapy reading passages about Zen Buddhism from some book. My favorite part was definitely the personal meditation. I tried it at home again today for only about 15 minutes, and felt incredible afterwards. 

I also realized why maybe it came so naturally to me – it was a feeling I've felt before. Like being on substances, or being at an incredible live show, where you aren't doing anything but feeling something, experiencing something, and not really even processing it. It's something I'm going to try and incorporate into every day. I don't have much of a routine in life lately, but maybe this can start to help.

FIDLAR

I love FIDLAR.

Earl Sweatshirt

I usually hate teenagers whether they're musicians or not but I love love love Earl Sweatshirt.

Directed by Hiro Murai

I picked a good time to give up health insurance.

When you don't have health insurance but are a human being, you sometimes resort to things like ordering your contact lenses from Canada and going to Planned Parenthood for birth control. I debated even writing this post but then thought that was silly, it's not some big secret, is it? But I will confess that I didn't check in on Foursquare at the last second despite convincing myself beforehand that I would.

Anyway, going to Planned Parenthood is a harrowing experience even if you're not looking for abortions and candy. There are metal detectors, a pretty serious search for weapons and other crazy person accessories, and then you get in there and it's all terrified teen couples. I went alone, because, you know, independence. You fill out the kind of paperwork that always gives me an existential crisis ("Is it possible that your partner has had other partners in the past six months?" check: Yes / No / I don't know. Isn't it always I don't know?? How could you say 'it's NOT possible'??) and then wait a couple hours.

For those who aren't women, pretty standard procedure is a weighing, a pregnancy test (peeing in a cup), and blood pressure taking. The woman who took my blood pressure made a face before trying it a second time. "Did you run here?" she asked me. (It's 100 degrees in NY today.)

I showed her my shoes. "Is it bad?" I asked.

She looked at me up and down. "You're not overweight, so I don't know what this is...You have really, really high blood pressure. But the nurse will check you again, it could be a mistake."

I followed the nurse through a maze of hallways and felt like if my blood pressure wasn't high before, it definitely was now. Not that I knew exactly what high blood pressure meant, except that my father has it. And that it gave him a stroke last year.

The nurse took my blood pressure a third time and looked at me. "Do you smoke?" was the first question. We took turns asking questions and the haze started to settle and I understood what was happening. I asked her what the risk of my blood pressure was. "Well. Heart failure, heart attack, stroke. Oh, or kidney failure." She looked sympathetic and judgmental at the same time. "You need to see a doctor either today or tomorrow."

"I don't have health insurance," I told her, alarmed.

She gave me a printout of doctors in Brooklyn who take patients without insurance and told me about hospitals that have emergency-care offices you can walk into. The word "emergency" also bothered me. She seemed surprised that I wasn't getting dizzy spells, blurred vision or fainting. "Your body has probably just adjusted to this over time." What??

It's always an awful thing to find out your lifestyle is killing you more quickly than you thought. She strongly recommended phasing certain things out over time, since a drastic change could give me a heart attack or stroke(!), and also put me on a special birth control that doesn't contain estrogen which is also really bad for your heart. I came home, read up on foods that lower blood pressure, and forced myself to eat a quarter of an avocado and beans (both of which I love usually) without salt. I felt sick after. I still feel sick.

CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA

Our last stop in Colombia was Cartagena, a port city on the northern coast of the country. Although it's on the water, it's not really known for its beaches. The nicest beaches are actually closer to where we had come from, which you can get to in less than an hour on these insane speedboats that go a thousand miles an hour and feel like they're going to break in half and kill you.

We rented an amazing apartment off airbnb that had a courtyard with a pool in it. I don't understand why this courtyard concept isn't more popular. Backyards are so dumb, everyone can see you. When I'm rich I'm going to build myself a house with an open air courtyard that has a pool in it.

In medieval times (like, 1500s) Cartagena was often attacked by pirates so the city center is protected by a stone wall with cannons. It's pretty cool. We stayed within the walls, where the streets are narrow and winding and the houses are all painted bright colors with flowers dripping off the balconies. There can be a seedy kind of feeling to the place at night, but during the day it was beautiful.

For anyone attempting to visit Playa Blanca/Islas del Rosario, here's how we did it since info on the internet s pretty sparse. We hailed a taxi on the street and asked them to take us down to the marina. The minute we stepped out of the cab, tour operators raced up to us. The first who got to us was waving a little piece of paper (which they all had) that you could mark off or tell them what you wanted – to visit the Islas del Rosario (there are multiple islands, but I'd read finding a good one could be hit or miss), or Playa Blanca, or go snorkeling, or go to an aquarium. The internet also said the snorkeling/aquarium were wastes of time/money, and we had only wanted to go to the beach, so I tried to make that as clear as possible and marked the paper. For just the round trip boat ride (plus lunch is included for free) it was around 60,000 pesos for both of us, or roughly $30.

They shuffle you through a ticket window where they write your name on a list and make you sit on folding chairs with a bunch of strangers. After about 10-15 minutes, they started calling names and pointing to different boats to get on, long fiberglass boats with roofs that have six seats across split by an aisle. Each boat looks like it holds about 40 people or so, and the only difference I guessed was which destination you wanted.

Our boat was full, all Spanish speakers. We were actually taken to the aquarium first, but everyone freaked out and started yelling in Spanish about how they only wanted the beach, so I'm glad for that. (The aquarium and snorkeling were offered at an additional cost as if it were an unmissable deal.) Finally our boat operators gave up and took us to the beach. The actual ride was insane. I loved it but I like being scared, but if you're afraid of traveling over high speeds on a fiberglass boat that feels like it's going to crack in half any minute, you might want to consider taking a car (which takes longer.) It was going so fast I was afraid to turn my head in case the wind ripped off my sunglasses. I was also too scared to take out my phone to photograph anything.

You get a free lunch (mojarra of course) and then try and stay in sight of your boat so they dont leave you when they return. You learn to recognize your group and stay near them, and we had no issues getting back on three hours later.

The one photo I was able to take during a rare lull, on the way back facing Bocagrande.

Playa Blanca