One of the great joys of living in the Bay Area is that in one day you can travel from cityscape hipster happenings, past suburban villages and beyond, towards vineyards on lush farmlands. The day trip is a delight to the soul, takes virtually no planning, and gives the added joy and spiritual lift of…
A Reunion with my Own Sense of Promise High school reunions are always iffy propositions. The memory we have of our classmates and ourselves is clouded by adolescent angst. Who we are now, who we thought we’d become as teenagers, and our feelings about our adult self make a head-spinning emotional cocktail. On the surface…
Central Wisconsin’s lake country is everything you might dream it to be: rural, unpretentious, uncomplicated and absolutely gorgeous. With lakes dotting the entire state, it’s a vacationer’s delight: quiet, serene, warm, and infinitely swimable. Our Wisconsin trek took us right to the heart of the State’s lake country—Wild Rose’s secret gem, Lake Kusel, and the…
In California, where I’m from, we don’t know the power of the traditional summer vacation—the migration of souls, en masse, from the city heat and humidity to beaches and the casual land of time-off. On the West Coast, the summer air cool, there is no humidity and the nights are foggy. But in New York…
New York City’s Midtown, in the heart of summer, is a tourist festival, a bustling rush of humanity from all ends of the continent. When every resident New Yorker is fleeing the heat and bustle of the city for Long Island’s beaches and lands afar—any lands afar, often—Midtown comes alive with an incredibly vivid press…
We were traveling on the internet down-low: packaged, last-minute, and with a “beach-friendly” sticker price. I had been longing for something off-track—coastal Lima or an obscure Columbian island I’d heard of while in Honduras—but I had already traipsed my fiancé through the off-season Mexican jungle just months ago, and he decided to put his foot…
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about art. I’ve been painting large 4-foot by 4-foot canvasses covered with layers of electric, abstract colors, and each day that I can, I turn off the phone and court a kind of tingling surrender to hues, shapes and textures as they pass through me. What’s stunning is that…