What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

“today.” I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul.

this is one of my favorite quotes from the book

And so to ward that off, I kept moving.

First, that I’m someone a little different on the road, and that vacation from being my home self feels like a great sleep after a long day.

fall in love with an exotic local in an exotic locale, since there is a return ticket next to the bed that you by law will eventually have to use.

And I began to need my trips like other people need religion.

But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women’s progress as a gender. I’m damn proud of us.

I pierced my belly button, got a Meg Ryan–circa–French Kiss–style bleach job and haircut, and went to Amsterdam.

(It took me fifteen years of unsuccessfully chasing that first high to understand that. Slow learner.)

when the relationship, as Vito said, “became about talking about the relationship.”

Do you think there is something about identifying this as a ‘problem’ that is working for you?”

in the chilly waters of junior high.

great description.

but also because I wanted to be the girl who hung out alone in Paris.

If you do make the mistake of growing while married, your marriage will end.

Truth.

The Girl Who Was Terrified of Losing Her Groove.

She got back out there, single and living alone for the first time at thirty-two, and met men who woke up something in her that she had never even realized existed. And she found me again. Just

You are open. You say yes to whatever comes your way, whether it’s shots of a putrid-smelling yak-butter tea or an offer for an Albanian toe-licking. (How else are you going to get the volcano dust off?) You say yes because it is the only way to really experience another place, and let it change you. Which, in my opinion, is the mark of a great trip.

You venture to the places where the tourists aren’t, in addition to hitting the “must-sees.” If you are exclusively

This last rule is the most important to me: you are able to go with the flow in a spontaneous, non-uptight way if you stumble into something amazing that will bump some plan off the day’s schedule. So you missed the freakin’ waterfall—you got invited to a Bahamian family’s post-Christening barbecue where you danced with three generations of locals in a backyard under flower-strewn balconies. You won. Shut the hell up about the waterfall.

I wasn’t that girl. I wanted to be up on the float.

Argentina made me feel backlit, like the girl who makes the music swell when the camera hits her, like the girl who first broke your heart.

Juan and I spent the next two months dating casually. By which I mean that I obsessed about him constantly, and he

that I had just gotten on a plane and made this happen. I’d had two months’ worth of firsts.

countries, and two Argentine lovers. I had learned Spanish, and the tango, and how to buy vegetables in Argentine supermarkets (which is

sat over the river, and talked about how the river had become something unique and amazing just by cruising along on its path. How even if your life seemed quiet and typical, you never knew if around the next bend you were about to become something spectacular.

“When we are old we will smile about these times we have together when we where young.”

like when an old married couple imagines their spouse is someone else in bed, spicing things up by pretending they don’t belong to each other. The trick almost always gives me that new-love zing for my life, and my city. I started to dream of a perfect life—not exclusively away

the trip to Argentina to prove that I could take on a continent alone was the thing I needed to get to the place where I

Accents also, I would add, mysteriously make men seem older, which is a handy way of fooling oneself into warming one’s lonely hotel bed with an inappropriately young suitor, another no-no for me on home soil.

yes. exactly

But I thought I had gotten something out of my system. That I could somehow redefine myself with an experience that

fantastic than a “jajajaja”? “Jajajaja” is perhaps the best argument I can think of for taking a Spanish-speaking lover.

Return to Fantasy Island. Which, Hervé Villechaize and ABC will tell you, is a dangerous idea.

My friend who traveled around Mexico alone as a twenty-two-year-old girl with just a surfboard, a sleeping bag, and a bus pass, the

She took antidepressants for about a year, trying to restart her usually plentiful serotonin, but that, too, led to more dark moments.

confusing mess with the cashier, who tried to explain to me in Spanish I didn’t understand that I was supposed to have done this whole weighing-the-veggies thing, while dozens of annoyed Argentinos waited, and I panicked. But this year

“Look both ways before crossing the street,” “Nordstrom’s has the best shoe sales,” and “Always carry twenty bucks for a cab and I.D. so they can identify the body.” So we took Sasha to the Four Seasons, checked her in, got her settled in white sheets under a tray of soup, and then she sent me back to our apartment, chastened and feeling like shit.

looked at it, like medicine, like my chance to right all of the wrongs that might exist in my life.

Maryland who had just come in from a week backpacking alone in the

was the kind of travel chemistry that doesn’t happen all the time, and it all happened because I lost my passport and my plan. If I had gone on the trip I originally booked, I would have been with older, rich, married couples. It was a reminder for me that reinforced my travel rules—

your fourth decade, your compatriots are mostly at home, working, raising humans, getting husbands through rehab, living for someone besides themselves. Suckers. That’s what I told myself.

was now at the bottom of the world with both no passport and no way to access cash. It was just one of those trips.

You can’t control everything. Just enjoy what the world is giving you.

was walking through a bar in Los Angeles thinking I was shooting some pretty sexy looks all around, and a woman stopped me with a hand on my shoulder: “Are you all right?” the stranger asked. “You look like

you’re going to cry.”

So anything that happened in public, say in a car or on a front porch, was first base, anything that happened inside one’s house, on one’s couch/kitchen counter/dining-room floor, was second, move into the bedroom and you’re at third, sleep over and that’s a home run. The system is meaningful, I think, because instead of giving away parts of your body like oranges at mile markers in a marathon, intimacy progresses based on how far into your house and life you want to let your partner get. That seemed like an important distinction.

Kiwis just kept passing me to other Kiwis, who inexplicably would invite me to stay for months if I wanted, and then call another Kiwi down the road to take me in if I was moving on. Maybe being in the

As someone who comes from a group of friends who no longer give each other rides to the airport or help each other move, I found it remarkable.

or in

And I was also not the kind of girl who waited for a man who couldn’t promise that he would let her back into his life.

you’re going to get shot when you walk out your door, life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally. And you have to evaluate and determine

and then give up that other awesome thing you want almost exactly as much. You have to trade awesome for awesome. Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose,