Note: This was originally published on The Everywhereist blog. There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it’s so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement. …

Last week, Rand and I crossed a milestone. I didn’t realize it; I was sitting at my computer, bones turning to dust, when he shouted from the bottom of the stairs, “HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!” “Holy crap. Twenty years!” I shouted back at him. And I ran down and hugged him, and…

In October of this year, we left for Italy. Our last trip there was scheduled for March of 2020. I think about that a lot — about the alternate reality in which that trip was still possible. I remember the date of our departure approaching, and my concern about this…

It’s weird to be a travel blogger who doesn’t travel. Actually, I don’t actually know if I can call myself a travel blogger anymore, but what’s the alternative? If I just say “blogger” without that key little word prefacing it all, it feels like I might unravel like a sweater…

Last week,, a friend showed up on our doorstep. He was there to go to a birthday dinner with us, the sort of thing that was commonplace two years ago but slipped into the realm of impossibility over the last 14 months, and now, somehow, is possible again. The dinner…

I hear a lot of people saying — as we approach the year anniversary of this pandemic and lockdown, a year of not knowing what it means to hug those close to us or see people we love, or do any of those previously forgettable but now utterly unimaginable everyday…

It is December 31st, the last day of 2020 — a year that has been supersaturated with so much shit and grief that it’s almost bordered the absurd. I have been to a Zoom wedding and a Zoom baby shower and a Zoom funeral, experiencing the spectrum of human existence…

Six months into an interminable lockdown, I find myself missing the long dead. The throughline feels like a logical one — it’s a pandemic. Of course I’m thinking about death. Death and the post office. That took me slightly by surprise, even in a year where nothing has been what…

Harvey Weinstein was found guilty today on some (but not all) of the charges brought against him by the state of New York. And I find this unbelievable, not because I believed in his innocence in any measure, but because I believe in the ability — as old as history…