For two years of my life I woke up, more often than not, at 5:25 a.m. It’s only bad when you’re not used to it. After a week of waking up before sunrise nothing could feel more normal. It’s amazing what we adapt to. Anything. My alarm was always set for 5:30, but I would [...]

When you’ve been blogging for this long - almost five years now - you begin to realize that the personal blog is something of an enclosed pulpit, a sermon to self, a sabbath reminder of your values and goals and needs and room to grow. You repeat yourself. Over and over and over and over [...]

She had the silent solemnity of those who are either insistently spoiled or have suffered greatly. I felt badly for having taken her seat - I was sure, but wrong, that the Accra to Monrovia leg of the flight would be less crowded. But she waved me back down with more annoyance than graciousness and [...]

Sauntering.
That, above all else, is this bear’s favorite pastime. Sin duda. If I visit your ‘hood and you ask me what I’d like to do, be prepared; ‘let’s saunter’ will be my answer.
I know what you’re thinking: Sauntering? Oso, what kind of psuedo-poetic bullshit is that? We call it walking. To which I respond with [...]

It’s true, my favorite Pepperidge Farm cookies were always the Milanos, the mint ones.
Paul Graham wrote an interesting essay in May about those social pressures that cities like to whisper into our ears. Manhattan tells us to make more money, he writes, and Cambridge tells us to read more books. What does Milan whisper? It [...]

You’re right, absolutely right, this is said about so many things, but if you really, and I mean really, think about it, then this, this must be humankind’s very first technology.
That’s what I was thinking. I cupped my hands underneath the bathroom faucet, the four fingers on each hand crossed perpendicularly, my thumbs sticking out [...]

20 days. It had already been twenty days. Twenty days in Medellín. Twenty days surrounded by the fungus-covered lime green walls of my private room at the back of the Black Sheep hostel. Twenty days of backpackers shuffling in, shuffling out, flirting, searching, flailing. Twenty days of scorching hot afternoons and buckets-of-rain evenings.
And twenty days [...]

It was the half hour sliver of clock that is neither day nor darkness. But nobody realized. Not the prostitutes nor the cocktail waitresses nor my taxi driver, cheerfully escorting one more stranger back to the airport, back to where he came from.
“Where do you come from?” he asks.
There are two types of latin accents [...]

The blue of the Las Vegas sky and the force of its sun never change throughout the day. It could be 8 a.m. or 6 p.m. Either way it’s bright and hot as hell. The lego-like horizon of the strip stares over the rest of the city in a stupor of superiority, full of its [...]

“San Francisco is like the lover of my dreams,” begins my sister, about to stick an oversized, oozing portion of panqueque con dulce de leche into her mouth, “but the relationship, for whatever reason, just doesn’t work out … you know what I mean?”
Her you-know-what-I-means always end with a slight wink of the right eye. [...]