Bloomington, IN (Summer 2017)
I don't want specialities. Steaks don't interest me. I am sure a $45 steak tastes fucking amazing, but give me the weird thing at the bottom of the menu. The thing that won't be here next time I come because no one else ordered it.
I want the thing that there is a 50% chance I hate it, but am intrigued enough to take that chance rather than not. I want the thing that catches my eye, despite knowing my eye and my tongue don't always agree.
Malmo, Sweden (January 2017)
It was the day we were leaving Malmo, yet after 3 days, I felt like I hadn’t really seen it. I’d seen the park, the center city, and new Malmo, but as I looked at the cartoonishly illustrated map that the hotel gave us, the places I’d been were dwarfed by the places I hadn’t.
I left the warmth of the hotel before 6:30am, bundled in every possible article of clothing that I had brought plus those that i had bought there to make up for the lack of clothing I had brought. It was cold and drizzling, big surprise, and bike was the only option.
I spent 5 hours riding around. Turning into alleys. Stopping at different cafes for different pastries. I got lost i
Burano, Venzia, Italy (July 2015)
When I was a kid, I was always amazed by grown ups who, when they told stories, would recall such specific details about far-off places. It wasn't just Italy. It wasn't just Venice. It was Burano, the island of brilliant glassblowers, houses every color of the rainbow, and in-board motorboats made of royal wood, like in James Bond.
I knew I wanted to be like that, but was unsure how to remember those details. I was already caught up in the seemingly infinite details of my finite world, like what that cute girl wore today in math class, who will I invite to my birthday party next week, and what flavor will I get when Stephen and I ride our bikes to get ice cream? How could I possibly capture the details of the entire world?!
In asking that initial question, I answered the first half of it. Observe. Being aware of and attune to everything: the beauty and the filth, the flamboyancies and the subtleties, the high and the low, the sounds and the tastes, the colors and the shapes.
Nyhavn, Copenhagen, Denmark (January 2017)
Malmo, Sweden (January 2017)
Gorges du Verdon, Provance, France (July 2015)
Places are meant to be seen once. Not in a "check it off" type of way, but in the appreciation of the world's vast size. There is so much to offer, to see, to do, to experience. Why keep reacting the same scene when the rest of the play has yet to be seen?
When you approach the world like this, each sight is met with as much awe as the previous blink. You welcome being fully enveloped and overtaken by the details of the moment, knowing its so overwhelming that you won't remember nearly as much if you focused on "seeing it." But the few details that you do will stick forever. Because you'll never see colors quiet the same hue. You'll never be able to recreate the mixture of smells and ambient noise. You can go back to that place to see it again, but you'll never be there again.
Singular ephemerality: the beauty in this world.
Nyhavn, Copenhagen, Denmark (January 2017)
Serengeti National Park, Tanzania (Aug. 2014)
As we 'sped' through the endless plains, we'd curiously speculate: if we took of running in a straight line through the waist-high grass, how far would we make it before something took us out? We'd ask Eli, and he'd give a serious answer but in a extremely sarcastic tone, "Not very far," so we optimistically settled on a half mile.
On the last day, we had to pull a U-turn, which is an ordeal in a 1993 Toyota Land Cruiser on a single track road. As Eli maneuvered back and forth, I aimlessly but adamantly stared about 30 meters out the window, convinced I'd be able to decipher which movements were just the wind and which were animals. My focus was broken by Eli yelling, in his joyful accent, "Oh my goodness!" Our endless K-turns had inevitably gone off the road, and no more than 8 feet off into the grass and directly under my line of sight laid a group of four languid lions. They had been totally unfazed by our presence, contently camouflaged, up until the point we nearly backed over them. The male, the least of the concerned, yawned, got up, and disappeared into the grass before our eyes.
Our 2,640 foot projection had just been undercut by 2,632 feet.
Serengeti National Park, Tanzania (August 2014)
It was 7:30am. We'd been in the Land Cruiser since 5:15, when we left camp for the far north of the park.
As we circled around a large rock formation, the plains that had seemed vast before became endless. I don't know if we were at the northern edge of the park or not, but it felt like we were at the edge of the world. It was by far one of the most surreal moments of my life.
As Eli turned off the engine, total and complete silence fell over us. Not the New York silence where there is miraculously no honking, no one on the street yelling "Fuck you,' and your upstairs neighbors are fucking on their shitty bedframe at the same time. Not even the silence of sitting alone in your room in the dark, with only the hum of your A/C. Literally, silent. No nearby trees meant not even the whistle of birds or ruffling of leaves. Eerily silent. After about 90 seconds, my ears adjusted, like an iris in the dark, and I could pick out the crunching of grass. Despite being nearly 100 meters from us, you could hear the twig-like legs of the tower brushing against the grass as they floated across the horizon.
When one of the group did feel the need to talk, it was in a whisper, like you would in a museum when you don't know exactly why you're whispering but it feels appropriate so you just do. I didn't say anything. I just remember whispering to myself in my head, "How is this the same planet that I am accustomed to?"
Copenhagen, Denmark (January 2017)
Serengeti National Park, Tanzania (August 2014)
It was dry season in the Serengeti, and while our guide, Eli, swore it would look like the lush garden of Eden come a couple months, the vast landscape before us was beautifully monochromatic brown.
The amber savannah grass acted as the foundation from which beige rock formations shot up. The slender silhouettes of acacia trees, whose elevated patches of leaves could only be described as cumulus-like and offered the only splash of green to the landscape, dotted the horizon. (Each time I saw them, I'd hear Bob Ross saying "happy little clouds.") Baobabs, with their squat and leafless stature, made a perfect complement to the acacias. While not as numerous as the acacias, they added just enough sturdiness to the barren landscape, as if holding it all down from floating away.
The terrifying vastness of the plains was broken only by the remnants of rivers, now just deep chocolate, dried mud beds with the occasional stagnant watering hole, and a network of dusty, copper dirt roads, which we relied on to navigate back to our oasis of khaki tents in a monochromatic world
Nashville, IN (November 2016)
Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY (December 2014)
Christiania, Copenhagen, Denmark (January 2017)
In the midst of Copenhagen’s modern design, elegant architecture, and royal history sits the stark contrast that is Freetown Christiania. “Formed” when artists and hippies moved into abandonned military barracks, it has a long anti-establishment history and is now a self-proclaimed autonomous district. As we walked through the vendors, food carts, craftsmen, and aimless vagabonds, the unapologetic authenticity was palpable. Within a 5 minute span, I watched a small boy and his father shred a graffiti covered half pipe and was told I couldn’t take photos and forcibly made to delete them all from my phone by a drug dealer, who for whatever reason the city has turned a blind eye to in Christiania.
Malmo, Sweden (January 2017)
Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY (December 2014)
The best things, the things that took time to make, that had all of the details in them like love, smiles, laughs, cuddles, drunk sex, inside jokes, all fade with time. The ugly things, the quick one-offs that took a second, the things that because they won't go away easily are just left there to ruminate, the things that others felt the need to impose with, stick around.
SoHo, New York, NY (August 2017)
I love New York; I hate New York.
Princeton, NJ (February 2014)
Many a nights after hours of studying for nothing in particular except to keep my head above water in each class, I would be walking home from the library exhausted to the point of overstimulation. I’d walk by names of people long long dead on beaches and courtyards and arches and various other miscellaneous features they deemed necessary to name and momentarily yearn for their entire life story. I’d notice a gargoyle that I’d never given attention to before, despite it always being there… decades longer than I’d been alive. I’d bump into classmates who, after a shot of espresso, were heading BACK to the library and wonder if they acknowledged the beauty around them, and if not, would they regret that later? That was really the key to “thriving” at Princeton: noticing the beauty in it all. In the highs. The lows. The struggles. The frustrations. Despite the seemed magnitude of it then, it was all a beautiful privilege to experience.
St. Paul's Cathedral, Vatican City (July 2015)
Princeton, NJ (August 2013)
Parq Guell, Barcelona, Spain (July 2015)
Che Guevara's Resting Place
Santa Clara, Cuba (June 2015)
Individuals become icons for many reasons. Some do good, some do bad, some lead revolutions while others stand over air vents. Most die young, but all of them are diluted down into what made them iconic. Leadership. Sex. Rebellion. Courage. Creativity. Style.
Like the history books written by the defeated, all other traits are forgotten. Some argue these characteristics diminish the stature, meaning, or importance of each individual's impact, but I argue the opposite. They make them human, and in being human, just like you and I, their impact, good or bad, real or fictional, is emboldened.
Roma, Italy (July 2015)
Lighthouse Beach, Eleuthera, Bahamas
Eleuthera, Bahamas (July 2018)
A rotten wooden sign, its white coat of paint severely chipping from the tropical humid air, hung from a tree along Queens Highway. “The Cliffs” it read with an arrow pointing east, towards the deep blue Atlantic. We sped past it on our first day, tired from travel and only half way through our hour drive. Although its condition, the sign was of the nicest, most legible ones along the route, so I figured it would be a well-established destination for tourists.
When we did make it to The Cliffs, there wasn’t a single sign of humanity. It felt like the moon and the end of the world had collided. And as we stood at the edge and looked down at the swells below, the water was so clear it looked only feet deep.
Museé Olympique, Lausanne, Switzerland (June 2017)
Vatican City, Roma, Italy (July 2015)
Venzia, Italy (July 2015)
Our European journey perfectly aligned with our personalities: intellectual excursions of history, art, and culture were planned but only if the hangover of the previous night’s outing permitted. We had graduated weeks prior in a rainy culmination of four years at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world. And I say that not in boasting but in awe. I, and the ones I became closest too, weren’t overly concerned with ‘prestige.’ I hadn’t been destined to attend an Ivy League school since birth; it was an opportunity given to me that I was, and forever will be, grateful for. I simply wanted to chase the knowingly futile endeavor of running and being able to do so with “Princeton” across my chest was an easy choice.
The highs and lows that would accompany that decision were unfathomable. Stress and tension, no matter how chill you were, are omnipresent when the concentration of perfectionists is so high. Add the black and white nature of running and those four years were heaven and hell at once. Even those most capable of “the big picture” were caught up in the rat race of it. “I need to finish this paper. I need to get an good grade on this. I need to impress this person. I need to.. I need to.. “
Less than 30 days after it all ended, as we sat along the Grand Canal, our feet dangling into the brackish water, passing bottles of Cabernet and Merlot back and forth in order to decide what one we liked better, the vain obscurity of it all was already blatantly obvious.
Praiano, Italy (July 2015)
We rented a car in Naples. A manual Fiat Panda; I drove since I was the only one who knew how to drive stick. It was an easy enough concept, until we found ourselves on a two-way road that was no more than a lane and a half wide on the side of a cliff overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Charter buses of tourists and semi-trucks filled with lemons sped around the corners as if they were Fiat Pandas, and a Fiat Panda is not a nimble car.
A few times we turned off the main road into what we though would be small coastal towns. Each one was only a few hundred feet off of the main road but hundreds of feet below in elevation, and each one felt too "commercial” with pre-arranged beach chairs and pinstriped umbrellas.
On the fourth turn off, we found Praiano nestled between the cliffs. As we settled in among the rowboats and jumped from the cliffs with the local children, we were confident we’d found a local gem. Then the gay couple next to Mazz told us they were from Toms River.
Bloomington, IN (November 2016)
Malmo, Sweden (January 2017)
Malmo, Sweden (January 2017)
Malmo, Sweden (January 2017)
Malmo, Sweden (January 2017)
Malmo, Sweden (January 2017)
Copenhagen, Denmark (January 2017)
New Malmo, Sweden (January 2017)
Bloomington, IN (October 2016)
