If You Write It, They Will Come 2019 will mark the second consecutive year that I write my goals for myself in a word processor (to later publish on the internet) versus in my Joe Jonas notebook. It feels both like a betrayal and like growing up. 2018 saw a lot of changes, some planned (traveling in South America for...
Goals & Outcomes A year has passed since I left my apartment, left my job, and left New York to go travel. I am the same person who turned in my keys, prayed I’d meet saner people on the road than those I’d shared apartments with in New York, and got in a cab to the airport in Newark, but...
From Backpack to Buenos Aires: New Home, Language, Life It's happened a few times that Diego and I have been in some public space in Buenos Aires—the wine aisle in the grocery store, the Bosques of Palermo, walking down Santa Fe—when, upon hearing someone speaking English, I immediately rubberneck in their direction, my ears straining to catch those whispers of...
Up until this year, my longest romantic relationship was a few weeks of infatuation and awkward makeouts that I’d shared with another knock-kneed fourteen-year-old during my freshman year of high school. My store of relationship understanding was pulled in equal parts from having watched Friends from pilot to finale two times through; having read novels, many of which featured a...
I wanted to love New Zealand. I bought my flights here in a passionate tizzy, psyched to see my sister and to explore the land that sparked a thousand movies. I wanted to bounce around various pieces of gorgeous scenery, communing with nature and losing myself in the reflections of lakes under mountains and long stretches of blue-green sea. I...
On a cold morning in the middle of August, Marta and I stood on the shoulder of the only road through town, a two-lane straight-shot that ran past the one gas station, three restaurants, and six places of accommodation that constituted the Tongariro National Park Settlement. It wasn’t the best place to get a ride—not a popular route, smack in...
Let's operate under the assumption that we're already in sync that when you travel somewhere, it’s good and appropriate and helpful and gratifying to have at least some of the basics of the local language down. To not be the foreigner barreling through a craft market crudely pointing at wares. To not assume that the world will bend to fit...
No part of me—not my brain or my passport or the now-shabby black Nikes I've worn for over 150 of the last 180 days—can quite believe that time has come for a second quarterly goals check-in. (And if we're being entirely accurate and accountable, which is kind of the point of this whole thing, that it's actually two weeks past...
Creamy scrambled eggs topped with freshly grated pepper. Thick slices of homemade bread toasted and dripping in butter. A rasher of bacon sizzling on the stove. Oranges nestled all around the kitchen in an assortment of cornflower-blue crockery. That is what I expected from breakfast on the farm. What I got instead was an helter-skelter spattering of carbohydrates heaped uninvitingly...