a trip to joe’s

Since deciding on going on that trip to Machu Pichu next month, I’ve put myself on a self imposed ban on shopping. I’ve also exiled myself to my room so that I’m not tempted to go out and spend on something I don’t really need like a shirt from Adidas SLVR or Lunar Grand Chukkas from Cole Haan.

But when it comes to food, everything is lifted. I can do without a new shirt or a pair of shoes but I don’t think I can live without that jar of beluga caviar because it’ll go well with hard boiled organic eggs.

So instead of going to the mall or Madison Ave., I hit the grocery. And when I do, I go to Trader Joe’s.

New York or bust

In the city that never sleeps, a resident learns to walk faster. He learns to swipe a MetroCard at just the right speed; how to enter a turnstile without touching it; how to find a comfortable position on a crowded train. He may be harassed daily by the notion that he hasn’t “made it” in his field, but the moment he goes to sit on a park bench and cry about it, he sees his fellow New Yorkers carrying out an entertaining spectacle that makes him forget why he was so distraught.

Maybe it’s two drag queens dancing to a homeless person’s radio.

Maybe it’s a group of Chinese women doing tai chi.

Maybe, as the comedian David Cross observed in the days following 9/11, it’s a rollerblader wearing a gas mask.

In New York, as Cross likes to say, “You are constantly faced with this very urgent decision that you have to make about every 20 minutes. You have to decide immediately, ‘Oh my god, do I look at the most beautiful woman in the world or the craziest guy in the world?’”

There are more than eight million other people bookended by those two superlatives, and while some, like your boss, might contribute to your stress, many of them reduce it.

Song for today: Payphone

All those fairytales are full of sh*t
One more stupid love song I’ll be sick

The Ex Factor

There are good and bad breakups.

Good breakups leave both content with their amicable decision to part ways either for their own sanity, financial reasons, or for the sake of humanity.

Bad breakups always leave one damaged, crazy, emotional, and or angry while the other sweeps their hurt feelings under the rug or is just plain meh about everything.

Either way, breakups are hell on the body, mind, and soul and I don’t wish for anyone to ever drag themselves through it.

I was once in an awesome relationship that ended because the other, unbeknownst to the other person, felt suffocated/chained/controlled/all of the above.  The happier significant other, meanwhile, thought the relationship was just experiencing another rough patch. Naturally, that situation could leave one wondering what they had done wrong or could have fixed to make it work. But as a very good friend once told me, “you can’t have everything, just almost always.”