Like most New Yorkers, my BlackBerry is surgically attached to my hand. Whenever I have the urge to write, or something inspires me, I open the “Notes” app on my phone and begin typing away. I then email what I’ve written to myself and finish and edit it on my computer. Not once do I ever touch a pen, pencil or notebook paper.
The other day I decided to send a thank you letter to one of my editors. I chose a nice stationary, picked a pen and began to write. I realised in the process that I had learned how to write in cursive as a requirement in the 4th grade; and I haven’t really used it since.
In our new age world of bluetooth, touch screens, email and instant messages, no one around is literally writing anymore. It used to be that people
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Just a few short stories of foreign escapades in the big city I call home.
Ever hear the phrase ”Opposites attract”? I never put an ounce of truth into until just recently. I think that a girlfriend of mine has the uncanny ability to attract members of the opposite sex who don’t speak English. I’m not sure what it is exactly- her contagious laugh, outgoing personality or that after a few drinks she thinks she can understand them, but anywhere we go, they find her.
About a year ago we were having a few drinks together at the local pub when she encountered an Italian filmmaker who had been spending 3 months making a documentary in New York. I have absolutely no idea how he went about interviewing people on the street, let alone ordering food with the limited English he had absorbed. I giggled away watching the two of them trying to relay certain stories to each other in broken Italian-English, or Enlglalian as I began calling it.
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A journey is not a trip.
It’s not a vacation.
It’s a process.
A discovery.
It’s a process of self discovery.
A journey brings us face to face with ourselves.
A journey shows us not only the world, but how we fit in it.
Does the person create the journey….or does the journey create the person?
The journey is life itself.
Enjoy the journey, and make notes along the way.
Discouraged.
No matter what accomplishments you have made, the “big city” is always there to slap you off your high horse when you could need it less. There are so many people, so many jobs and projects, and so many opportunities that Manhattanites seem to wear a number of hats.
No one has just one label.
For example. Anyone who works in retail or the restaurant industry in New York has a side job. No one is simply a waiter; they are writers, painters, actors, models or dancers.
The same goes in the fashion industry. Nearly all have been, are, or could be stylists.
If you work in PR,
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Lets face it: the world is an ever-changing place and I suppose its just natural progression that social standards follow suit. However, social networking sites like FaceBook and Twitter are ruining the dating world as we know it.
Romance has been ever present through out history.
Think back to drive in theaters, walks in the park, bowling, or even a simple bouquet of flowers. Now a days any event you RSVP to is shared, tweeted, “liked” and no longer a secret from anyone.
When my grandparents first started dating, my grandmother would take a 40 minute bus into the next town over and wait outside of an apartment building for my grandfather to
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What do you do when the words just stop?
In person, I am never at a loss for words and writing is my passion. These past few weeks mark the first time in my life when I have been unable to write. Topics and ideas are on a non-stop flood into my mind but when I reach for my Hello Kitty pen and paper it just ceases to exist. Maybe sensory overload or maybe the pressure to produce a seamless piece of writing- who knows, and frankly who cares.
In reality (and at times I really wish it wasn’t so) the fast pace of New York and my never ending list of freelance jobs, it is hard to find 15 minutes to myself, let alone a relaxed hour or two to pump out words on a subject that I’m proud of.
Writing without assignment is seriously difficult.
I can blog for Seventeen.com about rompers and thigh high boots until my face melts off, and do it well. But when I finally make it home at the end of a tiring day writing a column for my own personal site seems to get pushed lower and lower on my list as I begin to open FaceBook and read about Lindsanity Lohan’s latest shenanigans on PerezHilton.com.
Having your best ability blocked without reason or solution can be terribly frustrating- especially when instead of typing I find myself cruising party photos of girls I think I went to high school with.
No more excuses.
Picture the scene in the Wizard of Oz when all the dwarfs start to sing and dance after a house lands on one of the wicked witches- but not as creepy.
I would like to use this entry to announce my writer’s block officially dead!
More.To.Come.
Stay or go.
Live the rest of life on the run or spend it behind bars. Your only contact to the outside world through a glass window, watching everyone’s lives change and develop without being involved. Children, marriages, deaths; all the natural progressions of life watched from a fenced in yard.
Up late one night drinking copious amounts of wine, I got to know the man behind all of the stories.
“Career criminal” is what he had been labeled; and I had heard the a to z’s of his life, always plagued with low class women, drugs and crime. Rough was a good adjective to use but didn’t come close to defining him. He wore his long hair in a low ponytail under a confederate flag doo-rag. His tee shirt read “The Perfect Catch” and depicted a busty, animated woman with a fishing pole; on his feet he wore heavy-duty work boots.
On about the fourth bottle of a case of wine that he had “gotten a good price on from a friend” and a game of Texas hold ‘em, we began to speak about the choice that was looming just a few weeks away.
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While living in China, I shared a room and basically everything else with two girls from Estonia. Naturally we became extremely close and still keep in very close contact. In my year of nomading Europe, one of the girls invited me to come and spend a week with her, I was visiting my grandmother in Sweden and it was a very short flight to Tallinn, the capital. I happily obliged. I had never been north of Norway, but had heard many a story from my flat mates about the goings on of Estonia.
Estonia is a tiny boutique country that borders Latvia and used to be a colony of Russia. I assume once gaining independence the culture spawned a huge interest in celebrity. Estonia has a huge number of its own celebrity tabloid publications along with a corresponding number of local socialites and of course, their own editions of international magazines like Cosmopolitan, FHM and Playboy. I had heard rumors that the friend I was about to visit was a very well recognized socialite in the capital city and was often on the cover of such tabloids due to her past and present Estonian celebrity boyfriends. I also recall a phone call from her mother while we were in China that ended in a screaming match because someone had gotten ahold of her Facebook party pictures that depicted us dancing on most of the flat surfaces in Guong Dong Province and had published them with a headline that she was out of control in Asia. This fascinated me and I couldn’t wait to experience the mini eastern European Hollywood.
Tallinn is beautiful. So beautiful in fact I caught myself quite often thinking that
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