You're Supposed To Write This

What A Time. It's the first of the last 24 hours before I have to change the calendar on my wall. There's a hole in the left underarm of my sleep shirt and my sweatpants are borrowed from my sister, who's fast asleep across the home. Even though I have a cozy Brooklyn abode of my own, I'm in my home home with my nuclear family, in my big bed swaddled in linty, overly fuzzy blankets, thinking about how wild of a ride 2015 was. And I am smiling. A lot. The last time I even checked into this blog was damn near eight months ago. Absurdity. I thank God that I was so busy living that I hardly had the time to reflect outside of Twitter and inconsistent pen-to-paper diary entries. Living as in doubting, believing, struggling, seeing, crying, flying, moving, doing, being, succeeding. I've experienced every emotion and every sensation there was to be had, which is an amazing feeling. At the top of it all, I am grateful for life. To be aboveground. Breathing, unassiste...

Hopefully the title explains this well enough. I just wrote as I went, so take it as it is. Pure backpackers boarded my second plane. They all had overwhelming duffles and cumbersome knapsacks, thermoses hanging off of dusty Jansports and those heavy duty athletic sandals good for hiking and climbing over rocks. They were tan, not the beach kind of tan, red and leathery, but a healthy brown (for white) like they spent most of their time outside in parks and on nature trails. I would imagine that they smelled like earth. They had laid back buns and pony tails and white corn rows and boho skirts and billowing harem pants and guitars to strum around bonfires and those colorful hipster string necklaces you grab from a small country's local markets. All smiling and chattering down the length of the aircraft. "I like your hair," one said to me as she slowly passed my coarse twists. -- These flights have been superb lately. Super smooth with very little jitters on...

It's warmer than I expected up here. And calmer. The sun is strong on my arm through the slit of my window seat, magnified as it rises high over the Earth I'm not touching. Just two hours ago, I was freezing, my pores raised high on my even skin and my hairs standing straight. One degree outside, I believed, but I came outside dressed for 65 so that when 77 hit me in the face, it'd be a smoother transition. There's no one sitting in between me and Ms. Matilda. Okay, I'm more than positive that isn't this older woman's name, but her stature is sweet and her nature warm, like a Matilda. When I first climbed into 18A and she in seat C, she turned to me with a smile (and I returned a half one as I was greedily slurping meh-seasoned chicken soup from a plastic spoon), saying, "Now, is that as delicious as it looks and smells?" "Not really," I replied with a laugh, before she insisted it must be better than the hardboiled egg she had for ...

The moment I turned 24, I was already anxious and excited to turn 25. It just seemed like the IT age to be, and not just because 25 is such a perfectly rounded out number (that helps). By looking at my circle of friends and college alumni and other people I look up to, wonderful things seem to happen around that age. Not necessarily riches, fame and marriage, but smaller things that help build to whatever their definition of happiness entails. Progress. Confidence. Freedom. Movement. Thrill. Fluidity. Experimentation. Risk. Comfort. Discomfort. Spontaneity. Newness. All things that I can already feel happening in 2015, and luckily for me, my birthday is at the top of the year. So, before I fully jumped into my new quarter century skin, I wanted to take a moments to discover my self more with another challenge: #QuarterPieceOfMe. It's similar to #30DaysOfSELF in that it is a creative self-portrait challenge that I forced myself to stick to daily. But it's different in that t...

Humans are never a bore. An annoyance maybe when it comes to common sense, or a disappointment when it comes to morality, but there's nothing to get you thinking and feeling more than the human race. Sure, teacup-sized animals with pillow soft fur might make you awww a bit and the mysteries and deep open spaces of unexplored nature have you marveling, but the flesh and blood that we brush shoulders with daily, or the funny habits we squint our eyes at when we are privileged enough to catch a quick glance, never cause a dull moment. Especially in New York, where the time gaps in between memorable human encounters is almost as short as our patience being in close quarters with them.  This week alone has been full of blog-worthy encounters and non-encounters with the city's quiet inhabitants, and it's been fascinating. For instance, there was the scruffily dressed, dreadlocked man in line at the Bank of America on 7th Avenue, whose staff know him on a first name basi...