Writing
The Only Resolution You Should Make
I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. I do ‘December Absolutions,’ activities to reduce accumulated guilt by Dec 31 (and not a day after). A completed Absolution cleanses me from the past year while also validating my intensive champagne consumption as I step into the...
The Grateful Competition
Every year American families sit at dinner tables laden with nostalgic dishes and inaugurate the holiday meal by giving thanks. Over pours of red wine, each participant takes their turn to tell the crowd what they, uniquely, are grateful for. Perhaps some families are...
Why Delhi is Better than Burning Man
If you want to truly understand humanity and the full spectrum of life experience, don’t go to Burning Man. Go to Delhi. There, the gods cut a prism to bend waves of dark and light, casting a multitude of shades that flood the city’s crevices. Life breathes hot down...
Sell Your Suitcase: 4 Reasons to Stop Traveling
Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is stay home. 100 places to see before you die, Date a girl who travels and countless other travel happy posts have become cultish memes. We are encouraged to disown our neighborly quotidian life, flee to far flung...
How our ‘PC’ Culture is ruining us
No one says what they really think anymore. Our speech is layered under sucrose blankets, intentions lost in their folds. How did we become PC (politically correct) to the point of incomprehension? Do we fear our words will give people maladies of self loathing? Is...
A Woman at Odds: Baby or Love?
In many parts of the world, people do not have choices. The local store carries only one brand of toothpaste. Marriages are arranged. And fertility is finite. Notions of swiping people’s faces on Tinder and freezing eggs so we can ‘focus on our career’ read like...
4 Unconventional Ways to Celebrate V-Day, Solo
It’s February. Your city has transformed into a giant lace doily. Subpar chocolates are veiled in red tinfoil and instantly marked up to a 90% margin. Restaurants create prix fixe menus with courses named like a drugstore romance novel. “Cupid’s Cutlet” and...
Why I Write
In the book “Letters to a Young Poet” Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart. Confess to yourself whether you would die if you were forbidden...
Release Your Mind: The Art of Memory Management
“[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.” ― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting As we get older we accumulate memories. Some are splendid treasures that we go back and visit like we have a membership at the MoMA;...
This Season, Give the Gift of TMI
This December, I returned to Japan, the land of perfection. People scurried through immaculate streets, their porcelain faces masking a crock pot of emotions swirling and bubbling underneath the lid. In Japan, everything is seemingly pristine from even skin tone to...