Out In The Great Wide Open

I think about Johnny Depp a lot these days. No, it’s not some adolescent crush. It’s everything else. In the last five years, my life has rapidly evolved into a fairly stable, even boring one. Where an average Tuesday night once found me hailing cabs in remote corners of Brooklyn as the sun rose over…

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Learning To Fly, Part III

My brother, Christofer, willed me two things when he went off to college: a periodically empty house with an immediately unsuspicious mother (and, ergo, the license to throw frequent though reasonably-sized parties; there were no pizzas on the turntable at my house), and a handmade wooden lock box. Chris built the simple, stained-pine rectangle in…

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MegaFest!

When it comes to inspired festivity, Chris and Megan Abad don’t mess around. Chris’ thirtieth birthday celebration, AbadFest ’08, put me in the hospital (well, kinda’). A casual afternoon football game at Chris and Meg’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment once turned to a wildly-competitive beer pong tournament in a heartbeat. They’ve even make presidential debates fun.…

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The Road Leads Back To You

In May of 1992, I drove my red Nissan Sentra from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to Telluride, Colorado. I was a twenty-year-old child philosopher, whiling away the summer between my junior and senior year on highways and mountain tops of The Great American West in search of answers for love and life and everything else. The…

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The Magic Mountain

What’s the best part about riding an innertube down a mountain with a bunch of giggling eight-year-olds? Feeling twenty-nine years younger. Better yet? Momentarily forgetting those twenty-nine years altogether. Truth is, I didn’t have much business even considering spending the weekend in Vermont. My colleagues were crashing a half-hour Chris Brown and Rihanna special at…

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I’m Just Thirsty

It was 2:44 p.m., just shy of an hour before USAir flight 1549 slid into the Hudson River a few blocks west of my office. I was sitting at my desk, celebrating the few minutes I had between meetings by blowing email out of my inbox like Missile Command. “Attached are the last eight days…

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Planned Parenthood

On the street, Edward refused to take my hand, issuing a long, withdrawn, “Nooooooooooo!” So I carried him. On the subway platform, the roar of the trains scared him. So I held him, whispering, “I won’t let anything happen to you, I promise.” Abbi and I took Ethan and Edward for a few, long hours…

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Low Country Christmas

Cashmere and wool were the first casualties of our arrival in Charleston. The air was warm and wet. The sky wide and blue. Even with the wreaths that adorn the white picket gates of Bray’s Island, I wasn’t sure it was Christmas. My memories of the season are whited-out and frozen-over, not laid low with…

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