travel
I apparently forgot how to post for a while there, but no matter! I’m back today with some hot hot content for all of you out there who like traveling, or living vicariously through other people’s travel stories, or planning your own imaginary or real vacations, or just appreciating some nicely organized Google Docs. Let’s talk Ireland!
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* This post does not necessarily constitute a recommendation of this travel strategy
It's coming up on the end of the year, so obviously I'm going to write some year-in-review posts about the hot flaming garbage fire that was 2016. Before I get to those, though, I want to make an overdue post about the one big trip I took this year, and some advice/recommendations from it that might actually be helpful to other people. SO! This past October, I traveled to London, England and Paris, France with my mom and my cousin. We spent approximately 48 hours in each place, which was, I can say in retrospect, a ridiculous planning choice. I was the primary planner for the trip, and if I had a chance to do it all again, I know I would do some things differently. It's too late for that, though, so at the very least I hope you all can learn from my mistakes (and from my excellent choices, of course).
Our basic schedule for the trip was to fly out of Boston on a Sunday night, arrive in London on a Monday morning, spend Monday in London, then take the train to France on Tuesday and spend Tuesday and Wednesday in Paris. On Wednesday afternoon we took the train back to England, and Thursday was spent in London. We flew back to Boston on Friday morning. It was definitely an action-packed week.
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Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale is one of my favorite books ever. I've read it many, many times and I always find new things to love about it. I also taught it several times back when I was running undergrad English and writing classes in graduate school. I think it's an astonishing book, not just for its powerful, uncanny vision of the not-so-distant future, but also for the beautiful, poetic ways that Atwood uses language. Indeed, language—how it is used, how it changes, who get to use it, private versus public voices and vocabularies, and, to quote another great poetic work, "who lives, who dies, who tells your story"—is one of the main themes of the novel. Ugh, I just love this book. If you haven't read it, you really should, ESPECIALLY if you, like me, live in or around Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the book is set. Reading The Handmaid's Tale has been an even richer experience for me since moving to Cambridge. I can walk through Harvard Square and see glimpses of Atwood's Gilead superimposed upon the walls or ready to rise from beneath the surface of the streets, like the palimpsest that Atwood herself evokes on the first page of the novel.
Read MoreMy family always goes on one big vacation a year—indeed, often only goes on one real vacation a year, and ever since I was a tiny baby, that vacation has been to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. When my mom was a kid she used to spend her whole summers down there, although for my own childhood, we usually made do with a two-week interval, the only major time I'd spent away from home probably up until I went to college. Now that I'm a nominal grownup with a full-time job my own apartment and cats to look after, I don't spend the whole two weeks with my family, but I still manage to get down for a weekend or so every year. And I've been going long enough that I have some pretty strong opinions about what you should do if you find yourself on the Cape, so today I'm going to share some of those. This might be a bit much to actually tackle in one 36-hour visit, but let's be ambitious, shall we?
Read MoreFor my first post, I wrote a review of the Cherry Bombe magazine Jubilee that happened last month in New York City. Since I live in Boston, I had to travel to New York for the Jubilee and of course I wasn't going to waste a minute so I made sure I (and my friend Jeanne, whom I coerced into traveling with me) crammed as much as possible into a 36-hour visit. Those adventures are presented here as a tiny little travel guide to just a teensy fraction of the things you can do in the Big City.
Read MoreHi there.
I had been thinking about starting a blog for a while now. I even took a class on it. But I wasn’t sure what I had to say, or even what specifically my blog would be about; I wanted to talk about books, and style, and food, and feminism, and travel, and literary theory…basically a lifestyle blog for hungry, well-dressed nerds (hm..that sounds like a tagline). But that didn’t seem very marketable. Then, this past weekend I attended the Cherry Bombe magazine Jubilee, which was advertised as “a day of celebration and conversation with some of the most inspiring women in the world of food.” Here’s a tiny bit of background on me: I’m a woman. I like celebrating and conversing. And I am both personally and professionally involved in “the world of food”; I love to cook and bake and eat, and I spend my 9-to-5 hours editing cookbooks for America’s Test Kitchen. I also went to graduate school to study women’s writing and feminist theory, so in many ways this conference sounded made for me. I have a subscription to Cherry Bombe and follow their podcast and their social media posts. I think they are doing smart, interesting, and aesthetically pleasing things. I was pretty much all in. What’s not to like, right? I was ready to be challenged and inspired and celebrated. New York City, here I came.
But of course, a mind-blowingly perfect and beautiful experience wouldn’t really make a good opening blog post for my new project. So here’s where the story takes a turn.
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