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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.
I was a shy little girl and an only child, so on vacations I was usually playing alone, too afraid to go up to the happy groups of kids and introduce myself. Finally, on one vacation, my mom asked me which I’d rather have: a vacation with no friends, or one scary moment.
After that, one scary moment became something I was always willing to have in exchange for the possible payoff. I became a girl who knew how to take a deep breath, suck it up, and walk into any room by herself.
Getting married young is gambling on a game you don’t know how to play. You don’t know who either of you is going to become. If you get married before you are fully cooked, you have no idea if you are marrying someone who will ultimately be compatible with you.
No matter how in love you start out, no matter how much you dance in the kitchen and lock the bedroom door on Saturday mornings, love will die.
He kissed the SHIT out of me. One thing that a tortured, dramatic worldview does for someone is it makes him a HELL of a kisser.
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.
I asked her about that once, not long before she died. Why wouldn’t she want to go to the place that was her “favorite place”? “I was afraid it wouldn’t live up to my dreams,” she said.
When you reach the top of Everest, you want evidence.
I found a note from Juan on the back of the photo: “When we are old we will smile about these times we have together when we where young.”
Is he the one, am I irritated a normal amount or more than normal, will I ever love completely, why does he tell me trivia about the director while I’m trying to watch the movie, better make a pro/con list, will I ever meet someone and not feel the need to make a pro/con list blah blah blah.
One of my mother’s favorite pieces of advice, based on a week she spent in the Singapore Mandarin Oriental with the flu, was that when you find yourself sick in a foreign country, ignore the cost and check yourself into the nicest hotel in town. High-end hotels have doctors on call, room service, and daily clean sheets, and accept credit cards.
You can’t control everything. Just enjoy what the world is giving you.
Daisy the dog was still Kate’s only true love. Leaving Daisy behind was torture for Kate. She pined for Daisy the way you would pine for a lover or a child.
Inviting a penniless Brazilian into your house for food and parties is like inviting in a vampire, but with more drum circles. Once they’re in, you’re powerless and they’re not going anywhere.
“Tonight I feel like an emotional vampire.” I did not know what that meant, but we still talked about it for two or three hours.
I read Eat Pray Love, which caused me intense stress due to how much I both hated the narrator for her self-involved, self-inflicted misery in the middle of a pretty amazing life, and deeply related to her, due to my tendency to be self-involved and inflict misery on myself in the middle of my pretty amazing life.
I spent my nights and weekends playing. (And sleeping. I need a tremendous amount of sleep. It’s my least favorite thing about myself.)
On the other hand, if it was a blacker day, I used the whole not-writing thing as evidence that I wasn’t a “real writer”—“real writers” being people who wake up in the morning and grab pen and paper like they’re bread and water. (I don’t define “real writers” like this anymore, mostly because of a compulsive writing-procrastination habit of mine—collecting stories of great writers who hated writing. If you’re a writer, I highly suggest this incredibly soothing pastime, as it turns out it’s almost all of them.)
When you create sitcom characters, you need to figure out two things: what their flaws are that make them funny, and what their special talents are that make them lovable, so that people want to spend half an hour with these people in their house every week.
When people ask me what it was like to have my own network TV show, I describe it like this: it’s like spending your day going back and forth between two rooms. In one room, you have just won the lottery. All of your loved ones are there showering you with praise and love, and you are handed a huge check in front of a big banner that says “YOU DID IT!” while a triumphant brass band plays and confetti falls from the ceiling. But then you are yanked out of that room, and put into a second, dark room, where gray-faced angry people, perhaps lit from below like in a Kubrick film, scream, “YOUR BABY
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I had been an open book to untrustworthy people, and that had been my undoing.
My “tragedy” felt much less like a tragedy in the face of these real tragedies, and more like what it was: a really lucky experience that just didn’t last forever.
It’s hard to find single thirtysomethings at all, but if you’re going to find them anywhere, it’s in the midpriced, slightly comfortable, but not super-fancy sphere. This is my best travel advice for solo grown-up travelers: shoot for the middle.
Ultimately, this trip was me proving to myself that I hadn’t lost myself. But let’s be honest: if you don’t ever lose yourself, it means you’re not entirely in the game.
I went up to the front desk, and asked Björn (real name), the handlebar-mustachioed desk guy, if ghosts really lived in those mountains. “Oh, no,” he said, scoffing. “Ghosts live everywhere.”
The Blue Lagoon is Iceland’s biggest tourist attraction; annually it attracts more people than live in Iceland. Almost twice as many. It turns out that a glacial-blue, milky hot spring in the middle of an isolated black lava field is Valhalla. Surrounding the huge, steamy, mint-colored pool is creamy, soft white mud that bathers slather all over their faces before wading up to a wooden dock in the middle of the pool for drinks.
Iceland is possibly the most stunning country in the world. We rode tiny, fuzzy Icelandic horses across emerald green, spongy tundra, we snowmobiled across glaciers under blue skies, we strolled around gardens filled with tiny painted houses (for the fairies who live in gardens), we drank rum-on-the-two-thousand-year-old-rocks with a boat driver who chipped us off a piece of ancient glacial ice as we cruised by. We rented a car to get around, and so spent a lot of the time on nearly empty roads just driving.
Israelis have no patience for niceties or bullshit or small talk. They love direct questions and will always give you direct answers. They thrive on the probing and the personal, and delight in finding ways to laugh at things that are heavy and dark. Which is my specialty.
I always say that I need to travel to keep from dying of boredom from my own internal monologue. I think that, generally, most of us have a total of about twenty thoughts. And we just scroll through those thoughts, over and over again, in varying order, all day every day.
Do we want the same things out of life? Do we bring out the best in each other? Do we find each other attractive?
Expectations were always my undoing.
It was only in that moment that I realized what a life raft Juan had been for me all of those years alone on my couch, even when we weren’t in contact. He was out there. He made me different. He was a possibility, a maybe, just maybe. And that was now over.
This is, of course, why we are a good match. I am on constant alert to impending disaster, and he is constantly certain that everything is going to be okay.
“All tenderness comes from your first pain.” That is, all of those buttons that get pushed in your life, all of the things that bother you and worry you irrationally more than the same things bother other people, they all have to do with your first big heartbreak.
