1. Why don't you think about that over the weekend and if you still feel that way on Monday, you can totally send that email, okay?

2. Yes, you should not worry too much about the consequences and you should definitely quit your job that you hate and it'll probably all work out great. Job quitters are the happiest people around.

3. Pretty much the rest boils down to which moles people should get looked at and why Maalox is the best and how quarterly taxes are a necessary evil.

But now I realize that I do have a bit of work-related advice for young people! And it's something you maybe actually need to know.

As you, observant young person, have likely seen, in pretty much every decent-sized workplace you will find in a big city, there are an assortment of types.

• There is an array of normal, helpful, kinda boring, kinda decent, maybe-fun people who do most of the work.

• There are the funny, or super attractive, or moody, or, most often, very sleepy people, who appear on the surface to be engaged in the work and a vast benefit to the office, because they likely make you laugh or they make the office sexier, but they are just biding time at the office, because they have a Dream Career. In New York City, about 1 in 20 of these types are going to be mildly locally famous, at least in their chosen field of sculpture or knitting or standup or whatever. That's fine; let them follow their dreams. At least 5 out of 20 of them are going to be sending you annoying invites to comedy shows for the next 20 years, but you know what? You should actually go to one of those once. It's not that bad. Just be nice. Maybe you'll even enjoy it! Live a little! But most importantly, the good will that you accrue for this act will follow you for years.

• Then there are a smaller number of operators, divas, drama queens, vampires, bitter underminers and soulless careerists. This is what we are concerned with today.

These people are commonly regarded as annoyances. That is not quite correct, but a few of them are. You will learn to recognize the vampires. They're easy to disregard. They corner you, physically or digitally. They are coworkers who text you on weekends. They touch you in the office, in an attempt to suck energy through your skin. They stand in doorways, preventing people from passing. They tell you long, agitated and boring stories about people you don't know. (So do the drama queens.) They post on your Facebook page. They are unable to read normal friendship signals and pursue interactions that you have not instigated. You must not encourage these people; they'll follow you around for years, even when you no longer work together. You must 100% not engage, and let them have no traction. Eventually they will wander off.

The drama queens are a little more dangerous, because sooner or later you'll "betray" them and become a character in the stories that they bore someone else with. When they finally snap, go cold. Don't apologize, engage or grovel. If there's one thing I wish I'd learned at 18, it's that it's okay if a crazy person hates you. Everyone else will understand in time. Meanwhile, let them expend that energy. Go work on your novel or whatever.

And the bitter underminers, well, they're too obvious to even worry about. OMG they're going to make fun of you on their Tumblr!? That's okay. They are just frustrated. Be nice to them, they can get better with time, because eventually most of them realize that composing nasty emails about people they don't really know to their friends all day has been a waste of their energies. Some of these people turn out great actually!

Because vampires and divas and underminers are so loud and distracting, they take up all the emotional energy that we should actually be devoting to the real enemy. This is why we never destroy the soulless careerists. This is, I think, the number one mistake that we make in the world of work.

These are the boys who suck up to the boss's boss. They're backslappers. These are the girls who beg you to come out for drinks so they can talk about the tortures of their latest job offers. (In the world of writers, these are often people who are always telling you about what story they're pitching to whom.) They're often imperious (but not always; sometimes they disguise their narcissism as insecurity, to be manipulative). Really, they lack fear. They are likely sociopaths. They are identifiable because, if you stop and look, you'll realize it is unfathomable to you that this person who actually does nothing but complain in the office, and who goes out to lunch every day for hours, should be getting these opportunities. Oh, should I or shouldn't I take one of these exciting new jobs that I just can't choose between! they'll ask you.

And because you're a good person, you'll squish down your resentment and annoyance, because you think those feelings make you a bad person. In normal circumstances, you'd be right to do so. (And you should!) But not with these little monsters.

Because if you think you feel weird now, just wait until you read about their $500,000 book deal. Or their appointment as the editor in chief of whatever. (Again, not that you should be jealous or petty about the good or hard-working or hilarious or wacky people who get these things. Try to be excited or at least amused about that! It's actually easy to love it when your pals become successful.)

The soulless careerists, though: they get where they are because social training doesn't allow us to stop them. They depend upon our unwillingness to say "bad things" about people. But if you don't, who will?

It is incumbent upon you to put a fucking boot in the face of the soulless careerist.

When people ask you about them, tell the truth. Practice saying "They're useless and horrible." Practice saying "They're soulless careerists who don't care about anything or believe in anything and they're just using us all to get ahead at any cost." Practice telling the truth. They can't stand the exposure in the light of day. They can't keep stepping on people if their previous steppings-on are known. You'll all be happier in the long run.

Do it for the generation to come! Do it for all of us.

Alternatively, you can just go to a lot of yoga and not worry about any of this at all, that really works too.

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1. The Times' health coverage often gives way to local news-flavored hysteria. You can’t expect the Sort of People Who Tend to Read The Times to freak out about Amber Alerts and Child Molesters. The readership simply isn’t concerned with anything that has no direct effect on them, unless that thing is cool (design), epic in scale (Nicholas Kristof) or risible (Tom Friedman). About the only thing that will get upper-middle-class coast dwellers into a frenzy is the idea—the word 'fact' is so black and white, n’est-ce pas?—that Some Day They Are Going To Fucking Die. Like to exercise a lot? That might MAKE YOU DIE. Do you just like to walk leisurely? Is that what you enjoy? Too bad for you, because if you don’t get your heart rate to 96 percent capacity, fourteen minutes a day, eight times in a 15-day cycle, YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. Guess what else? If you don’t have hot sex enough with someone who also loves you and pays your bills and who has the same values as you (good luck with that one!), your brain will stop secreting a certain hormone and you WILL DIE. If you do not make this beet green pasta dish like Mark Bittman made and get this special trace mineral found in beet greens that’s the only thing that feeds your liver oxygen, YOU ARE ALSO GOING TO DIE. This yoga article—actually, an excerpt from a book by Times reporter William J. Broad—is in this tradition. It finds subjects with genuine, perfectly reasonable things to say and a few suspect anecdotes and by the time a little Science (said in Thomas Dolby voice) is thrown in (some of this science is from 1972!) everyone has run away screaming at the top of their lungs: "Yoga, noooo! I’d be better off smoking crack and turning tricks outside Benito’s."

2. Yes, you can get injured doing yoga; you can also get injured walking across the street. People tell you all kinds of crazy shit about how they hurt themselves. "I was taking out the trash," "I was raking leaves," "I was vacuuming with a vacuum cleaner I don’t normally use.” The cures are often even more ridiculous than the causes. “I got a new pillow filled with millet." "I got a dog leash with a wider strap," "I did a watermelon basil enema—and it’s gone. No, not my entire asshole, dummy, my hip pain!" Who in this world has not been flat on their back and suddenly gotten a check for 5k or a promising phone call from someone hot and leapt up, miraculously cured, ready for shopping and hand jobs? Which is not to say that no one ever gets hurt in yoga. Of course they do. I have pulled a groin muscle, a shoulder muscle, a pectoral muscle. (I once got a nasty sore throat yelling at Jivamukti’s assistant manager when she let someone else take my vintage Pucci tights out of the lost and found.) But seriously. What is life but a series of mundane moments, punctuated by hazards? Someone once told me he ruptured a cervical disc reaching out to pick a piece of lint off a friend. The Times headline for this would have been “When Sweaters Are Not Just Warm.” And yes, this person was gay. I’m certain the gesture could have been a bit less operatic.

3. Let's let this one speak for itself. “In one case, a male college student, after more than a year of doing yoga, decided to intensify his practice. He would sit upright on his heels in a kneeling position known as vajrasana for hours a day, chanting for world peace. Soon he was experiencing difficulty walking, running and climbing stairs.” Oh my god. That is so weird! I can’t believe someone would sit for hours a day, days on end, in one position and get hurt. That reminds me of the time I sat around in my house eating Twinkies for hours and hours, chanting for world peace. Soon I was experiencing being really fat.

4. Did yoga really cause that stroke/aneurysm? One example in the article comes from 1972. A woman went into wheel pose, in which she rested on her head, and then had a stroke. Another guy did headstand every day and had a stroke. Well, a lot of people suffer heart attacks having sex or running, but isn’t this because their hearts are already fucked and they have sex or go running and their heart’s like, Okay, here we are, it’s go time? Isn’t it very likely that the moment that these people were doing these things was the moment that they had a stroke, and if not, well, why aren’t classes just full of people having strokes? I’d also like to add that my aunt died of a stroke too, and no one wrote an article about how eating Stouffer’s creamed chip beef and being married to a drunk asshole with orange hair causes strokes. Sometimes people just have strokes. My sound medical opinion on this is, “Better you than me.” And you know, if these people did get strokes from yoga, they were putting extreme amounts of weight on their head. There is an easy way to avoid this. Do kundalini yoga, which is headstand-free. Or merely do not do headstand. You will miss about .001 percent of what goes on in the average yoga class.

5. This article is actually more about how no one should go to a bad yoga teacher, but, you know, who would want to read an article about that? This article focuses on Glenn Black, a yoga teacher whose own injuries forced him to evaluate both the teaching and practice of yoga. He mentions “teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, 'You should be able to do this by now.'” Well. I don’t want to go to class with any of these people either, but the existence of bad yoga teachers comes neither as a surprise to me nor some sort of proof that the practice itself is flawed. I have never been shocked to come across bad teachers, bad policemen, bad psychologists (are there any good ones? Please let me know), bad dry cleaners or bad restaurants. I’d rather go to a bad yoga class than a bad restaurant. At least you can take a nap. There’s a way to avoid doing stuff you don’t want to do in class, and it’s called 'having boundaries.' If your yoga teacher looks like they might jump on you—and whimsical hair style, body odor and overuse of the word "magic" would all be danger signs—approach them before class and ask which side of the room is for people who dislike being jumped on.

6. What’s wrong with yoga is not yoga. According to Paramahansa Yogananda, author of the yoga classic and all-around great read Autobiography of a Yogi, Kriya Yoga was well-known in ancient India, but was eventually lost, due to "priestly secrecy and man’s indifference." If we lose yoga it will also be a one-two punch, from different forces. One will be because we let the idea that we don’t really know our limitations—this is a core idea of yoga—translate into fantasies about how we can do a backbend even though we’re fifty and kind of fat, because hey, to believe it is to be it, etc. Combine this misuse of yogic philosophy with our capacity for senseless competitiveness and fear of being old, or ugly, or anything but the best, and yes, you’ve got a good recipe for injury. But if you think of yoga as a great way to breathe more, well, you’re not going to get hurt.

I'm sure Glenn Black is a great teacher and a great guy. And hey, I’m not about to trash some guy who just had his vertebrae fused. But I do marvel at his account of having put himself through 18 years of painful backbends. How did he do yoga for so long and think that doing a freaking backbend was really so important? If I lost my legs and arms and was being dragged around on a skateboard, I would still do yoga. To quote the Bhagavad Gita (and yes, I got this from Wikipedia), yoga happens when we are "[o]ffering inhaling breath into the outgoing breath, and offering the outgoing breath into the inhaling breath." Whether you hate the word Universe or love it (I have mixed feelings) I assure you it does not give rewards for enduring physical pain. It does, however, seem to give some rewards for learning to recognize yourself as a mere speck in its enormous scope and yet somehow representative of its totality while also seeing the same in others. Which is why it would kind of make me sad if people read this Times article and decided that the elliptical was a better way to unwind after work. Not that I have anything against ellipticals—though I have a sneaking suspicion the Universe may actually frown upon them.

You don’t have to stand on your head to see what’s left of you when everything else is gone, and it's something you should really take time to find out. Just in case The Times is onto something with this whole death thing.


Related: Why Yoga Can Be So Irritating (Although You Should Go Anyway!)


Sarah Miller is the author of Inside the Mind of Gideon Rayburn and The Other Girl, which are for teens but adults can read on the beach. She lives in Nevada City, CA.

Photo by Dmitriy Shironosov, via Shutterstock.

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But chances are you may not remember what it feels like to sit down with a nice desk in front of you, some loose-leaf paper, a pen and only a slight idea what you’re going to say. It feels pretty good, especially if you’ve been popping Adderall, smoking cigs and going about your daily life without any time to reflect. Writing a letter is a nice way to unwind and let the obtrusiveness of jobs, commutes and social obligations fall by the wayside. Who should you write? Well, how about your grandma or grandpa?

Your grandparents, if you’re lucky enough to have any still alive, came of age in an era when there was nothing but the telephone, the telegram and USPS conveyance. One of those modes died and another might not be around much longer. (FedEx, for the record, was invented in the early '70s.) Some of your grandparents are happily on Twitter; some are grooving on Facebook; some don't quite get texting yet. Your grandparent v. technology mileage will vary—but nearly all remember the delights of physical mail delivery in a way that people born in the '80s just can't understand. Here are some tips for writing your letter.

First thing, make sure you can still write. A lot of my friends have the penmanship of a doctor with cataracts, but with a little struggle the print letters you struggled to perfect in grade school should come back to you. Don’t even think about longhand. If you’re like me and trend towards a mash-up of cursive and print, then make sure you’re cognizant of your scribbling shortcomings (we all have them—my writing is also cramped). Don’t cop out and type it, even on a typewriter.

This is not the great American novel. Don’t overdo it. Your grandparents come from a time when people routinely read books and newspapers every day, and authors were famous regardless of their inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club. But just because their generation was more literary-minded doesn’t mean you need to write a Nick Adams vignette within your letter (although a fishing story might make your grandpa happy). Keep it simple and to the point, the main focus being your love for them.

I can’t comment for everyone’s grandparents, since they’re all different, but there is one trait they almost all share: Loving their grandchildren. That unconditional love may exist because they’re untrammeled by the vestiges of your adolescence (unless they raised you, in which case it might be more complicated). You’re their grandchild, so minor indiscretions are ignored or forgotten. No matter how many tattoos I got, or piercings, or how many times I dyed my hair growing up, my grandma always loved when I stayed with her and thought I was an angel even when the rest of the family did not.

Out of deference to this unbending love, try to focus on topics in your letter that will bring them pleasure. This is not a creative-writing exercise; the point is to let them know you’re thinking about them. Bring up the last time you were together. Focus on something you know they’ve always loved. For me it was the Miller Light that always sat next to my grandma at the dining-room table. A few years back someone ordered her a microbrew at a restaurant in the Bay Area, and she spat it out and asked the shocked waiter, “Can I get a real beer?” (I’m looking forward to Macro Brew jokes.) Sitting at your desk, grasping for memories long since misplaced, you’ll be surprised by how sweet and genuine these recollections may be. Your grandparents may have forgotten some of them too, and it will be a nice reminder for both of you.

Once you’ve successfully penned your letter, now it’s time to send it. Do you even have their address? Try to get it without calling your folks or a relative that lives nearby them. I’m assuming that for many of you this letter will be meant as a surprise (my first one was), so send it like you mean it and without the aid of others.

If you’re unfamiliar with how postage works these days, you should know that you now can purchase first-class stamps, "forever stamps," that will always be the correct postage. Declining revenues mean the cost of sending mail is rising almost as fast your subway fare. These special stamps will always work, and your grandparent will get a letter from you, and you have no idea how happy this will make them.

My only remaining grandparent is reaching the end of her life. A lot of people would be uncomfortable with this notion, but not my grandma. She’s tougher than my family, and me, and she wouldn’t want any of us to shrink from the natural cycle of life. I’d like to think these letters remind her of all that she’s given to me (and others) over the years. She’s 60-plus years older than I am, and I’ll never be able to thank her enough for all the wisdom and humor and guidance she’s passed on to me. By writing to her about joyful memories we've shared in the past, I try to give her some joy and amusement in the present. And that's what all of us want—regardless of age.

If you have a grandparent alive, send them a letter too. You won’t regret it.


Spencer Lund thinks you should write a letter to any grandparents you have left.

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In a couple sentences, describe how did you ended up here, sipping a Tirulian Schpritz (gin, Aperol, yellow chartreuse, lemon, grapefruit) in a restaurant you own with nine other people?

There wasn't an exact plan. Basically, I've been lucky to have lots of cool stuff that I've either heard about and has come my way or that I've gone after. Some of it has been by accident and some of it has been by design.

So, no plan at all?

No. None. I thought I was going to be a physicist until my roommate in college also wanted to be a physicist, and he had already discovered a sub-atomic particle in high school. I thought, "Okay, change of plans."

I was watching a talk you gave and you mentioned that your father was an incredibly smart English professor. You very actively decided not to be a "fiction" guy because you felt you couldn't compete with him.

It's how I got interested in the sciences. He was this brilliant English professor who was a speed-reader. He read three novels a day. He had a photographic memory also, so it seemed like I would never catch up. He knew nothing about science, math or chess, so that's where I started. But it's funny. In the end I've come back to what he does, which was storytelling. It just happens to involve science or math, but I’m interested in the people behind it almost as much as the subjects themselves. I was lucky, too. When I was first out of school there was a big interest in science. The space shuttle went up for the first time, and there were all these popular magazines so it was easy to find outlets to write for. They all folded eventually, but when I got started there were a lot of places to write.

You mentioned both going after jobs and having them find you. Can you give an example of each?

Right after I graduated from college I started a job as an editor at Scientific American. They had a very small staff and people never resigned. The next person was like twice my age. I [had previously] met the editor-in-chief at some function, and he wrote me a letter. He had read something I wrote, said he thought he was going to have an opening at the time I graduated, and wanted to see some more of my work. It was very fortuitous. Then when I was 30, Discover—which had been started by Time and lost a lot of money—was sold to a small entrepreneur. I read that in the paper and really wanted to edit it. I sent the new owner an eight-page letter of how I would rejuvenate the magazine. He responded to it, and I got hired. I didn't think that was going to happen. I skipped a million rungs from being an editor [at Scientific American] to suddenly running the place.

A lot of stuff just happens, but there was other stuff that I really went for that I didn't get. I would have loved to run the Natural History Museum. Years ago, I was approached by the search committee and I got very far in the process. The issue was that the Natural History employs many workaday scientists. The search committee felt that because I just have a bachelor's degree, these people might not be able to stomach taking direction from me. I really wanted that job. I thought I would have done a great job of changing the museum. I made a huge effort.

Did you have a career goal, a top of the mountain? Or is it just a series of rolling hills?

My issue is that I'm interested in too many things. I'd like to be running a magazine and writing a book and making a movie. Which is kind of what I do. I go back and forth. Writing a book, you almost have 100 percent control compared to anything else in this world. If you write a movie script, it's going to be changed a billion times. If you work on a television show, it's a collaborative effort. So it's fun to be able to write books, but I miss the working with other people, which I loved when I was running a magazine. Not just the writers, but artists, photographers, the whole shebang. [Going project to project] can be nerve-wracking. You build up expenses and it's like, "Where's your next project going to come from?" but at the same time, I'm really glad that I haven't been stuck in one thing forever. I've had some long runs. I ran Discover for ten years. That's not a short time.

Do you feel that you jump from project to project more quickly now?

Yeah. For ten years now, I've been going from one project to another, but they are fairly long projects. I'm not writing 40 articles a year to make a living. I'll do a six-month project, a year-and-a-half-long project. I like that because I get more involved with the people who I'm working with. It's not just in and out. I've done a lot of stuff where I come in for one week as a consultant. I don't really like that. The personal dynamics of that are weird. The people, of course, are suspicious that they're being evaluated, that you are going to fire them. Even if that's not what you're hired to do still there's a weirdness to it that I don't particularly like. Stuff that's more collaborative is more fun.

What's the best job you've ever had?

Running Discover. It was just incredibly fun for all kinds of reasons, starting with the fact that in science writing, you're really never repeating yourself or doing the same story. It's not like celebrity journalism where certain people walk down the street and it's a cover story. I never got tired of the material. And it's a challenge. You're writing about stuff that's invisible, so you have to figure out how to illustrate it. You work with conceptual artists who can get stuff across. The stuff is not so obvious.

Would you want to edit a magazine now?

Yeah, for the right thing, maybe.

What's the worst job you've had?

I've had experiences where I was ghostwriting a book for somebody, and it just didn't work out. I got out early enough before it became a problem. When I first started at Scientific American, I did a fair amount of ghostwriting for very famous scientists who had won Nobel Prizes and things like that. It was a mixed bag. Doing it for the most famous people was the easiest because they were more lax. They had incredible reputations. It was more the people who didn't have tenure yet who thought their cover story in Scientific American was going to get them tenure. You're discussing with them whether they are going to use serial commas or not, it's like, "Dude."

How did this restaurant happen?

That's a good question. I'm a big consumer of specialty coffee, and I'm interested in the science of coffee. I wanted to do an online coffee business so people who aren't in cities like New York, Seattle and Chicago could still participate in the specialty coffee phenomenon. I thought maybe even retired people would like to get coffee in the mail as opposed to getting Folgers at their A&P. I started exploring that and I met this guy who had a company called Oral Fixation. They sell very high-end coffee. Then he sold his company to a much bigger specialty food company and wanted to open a restaurant. There are like ten of us who invested in it. It's an unusual situation. The place is doing really well, so we're lucky. The one benefit of having ten people is that we all have different circles of people that we know. The base caters to this neighborhood, but the fact that we have other circles of friends has been great. I've always wanted to do a restaurant, and I thought this would be a good way to learn.

Is there another restaurant in the future?

Yeah, hopefully. Definitely.

What else are you working on?

A book I did, Wings of Madness, is becoming a movie. Chris Wedge, the guy who did all the Ice Age movies, is making his first live-action film. So I'm working on that with him, which is really pretty fun. I'm a consultant. I make sure the set looks like Paris in 1900 and the technology is correct. He's also been very nice in including me in other aspects. I'm also working with Erno Rubik—who invented the Rubik's Cube back in 1974—on a traveling museum exhibit for the 40th anniversary in 2014. I'm working on the mathematical and cultural of significance of it. It's the best-selling toy ever. A billion. And that's really fun because I've been going to Budapest, which is an interesting city. That's my major project at the moment.

He came to me. I hadn't had any experience with him before, but it helped that I wrote a book about a Hungarian mathematician [The Man Who Loved Only Numbers], so I have some connection to Hungary. I've done a fair amount over the years in trying to popularize math to people who aren't mathematicians, and there's a fair amount of math involved in the cube. It touches a lot of things, obviously—pop culture, cinema and movies—but there are interesting mathematics in there.

One of the more absurd lines on your resume is as creator of the puzzle in Romancing the Stone. How in the world did you end up with that gig?

I was writing a weekly syndicated newspaper column at the time under the pseudonym Dr. Crypton. Each column was a short mystery story. Michael Douglas called me up out of the blue, said he was a fan of the column, and hoped I could come out to LA and make the Kathleen Turner character smarter. At first I thought it was one of my friends impersonating Douglas.

Do you think someone could follow a path similar to yours now?

In the dot-com world there's no predetermined path of how you achieve success. Many more doors are open. If you're going to become a lawyer, you still need to go to law school, but there is no tried and true path [for other types of jobs]. On the other hand, I know a lot of people in their 20s and their self-imposed pressure is even higher. They look at people who are multi-millionaires by the age of 30, and they assume that's what you have to do. I think there's more opportunity for people who are in creative professions to succeed. I saw the other day that 65,000 people make a living as a designer in New York. Some don't make a great living, of course, but that's pretty fabulous. It certainly wasn't like that 20 years ago.

Anything you wish you'd done differently?

[Pause] No, not really. I hope I'm doing the same stuff at 90. I'm not going to retire. I might be showing you to my table in the restaurant.

Chicago once called you "the smartest man in the world." suspect they weren't far off. How much of the success is just because you're really smart?

Maybe it's a product of that, but it's probably also that I have these storytelling smarts. There are plenty of smart people in the sciences, but they can only get three people to listen to their theory because they don't know how to present it in a way that can capture the attention of other people. I have a marketing hat on. I hate to use the word "marketing," except that it is. I know how to market the stuff, and I know how to present the stuff. Look, what I do is pretty unique in the sense that a lot of what I've done is publishing mathematics. Who would have thought that you could make a good living from it? Sometimes being very good in a small pool is better than being mediocre in a large pool.

What would you tell a 22-year-old kid?

First of all, I would say, don't sweat it. It's really easy to say that in retrospect, but I really do mean that. You can make mistakes. You can take a job and six months later you can decide that it's hell. "It's not for me. I'm not interested in this." That's totally okay. In fact, that's easier now because the paths are not so well defined. People that present their careers as entirely successful from the age of 15 and on, most of it's fiction. Okay, maybe that's true in a couple people, but that's a couple people. There are several billion people on the planet who have managed to make their careers in other ways. You can't be afraid of failure. Even if you look at these incredible successes—people who were multimillionaires by the age of 30—often they did something that wasn't a success at first. Passion is so important. You have plenty of opportunities to bounce back if something doesn't work. If you see something out there that you really want to do, just go for it.

Okay, last question: Who should I interview next?

Annie Novak. She's a pioneer of rooftop vegetable farming in NYC and has a cool vegetable farm on the roof of a production company in Greenpoint.

Noah Davis is frequently lost.

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And, it turns out, I know who Sugar is—she and I have actually known each other for a few years, but I didn't know I knew. Would the magic hold, now that I knew her identity? How much does her anonymity inform the power of her advice? And OH MY GOD, now she's planning to divulge her identity to EVERYBODY? Sugar agreed to talk about all this and more if I agreed to keep her identity a secret for just a little bit longer.

Matt Davis: So, who am I interviewing? [Sugar’s real name], or Sugar?

Sugar: Well, you asked to interview Sugar.

I guess we’ll get to that. I mean, that’s the fun part of it, right?

Right. Who are any of us? We’ll talk about that, too. Who is Sugar? I mean, Sugar is me. You know. I just won’t tell you my name, that’s all. I don’t tell you the city I live in, I don’t tell you my name, and I don’t tell you the place where I grew up. But I tell you pretty much everything else.

I knew you before I knew who you were. I was saying how good your writing was as Sugar, on Facebook. And then you contacted me to say ‘actually you know it’s me, right?’

I thought you knew it was me! Because basically, when I became Sugar I did tell [a mutual friend]. I just said ‘hey, I write this advice column,’ and I knew he told a few people and I just assumed you were one of them. So I thought you knew. So when I emailed you, ‘you know I’m Sugar, right,’ I was surprised.

I’ve been going through a divorce, and your work was very helpful in carrying on. So I was evangelizing the work. I didn’t know who you were, I was really positive about the work. And then to hear that I already knew you was quite disconcerting, actually.

I think that’s going to be disconcerting to a lot of people. Because one of the most difficult parts for me about being Sugar is when writers that I know, you know, friends, colleagues are writing about me or blogging about me and I don’t tell them. I told you because I sort of thought that you already know, and I don’t quite keep track of who knows, but it’s sort of disconcerting to me because I’ve got to keep this secret with people who I actually know. It’s going to be interesting, when I come out, how they’re going to respond. But also people guess. Anyone who’s really read my work, I get an email once a week or so saying ‘you have to be Sugar,’ and I’ll say, you know, ‘yeah, and please keep my secret.’ So, probably, a hundred people maybe.

Well there goes my business plan, because I was thinking I could just offer to tell people who you are for money. So when are you planning on coming out?

But Matt, that’s the thing, it’s all relative. Because let’s say a hundred people know. I’ve told certain people, Stephen Elliott’s told certain people, Isaac Fitzgerald, who’s the managing editor of the Rumpus, he says he tells certain women whom he wants to sleep with, you know, he says ‘if you’ll do me, I’ll tell you who Sugar is,’ so, and I think he’s only partially joking.

No I think he probably is, too. That’s amazing.

Most of the people, even if they knew, ‘[Sugar’s real name]’ doesn’t mean anything to them. So. I mean, I’m anonymous if you don’t know who I am, right?

I guess so. But your work has found an audience irrespective of the Sugar stuff, right?

Yes. It has, absolutely. But most people, they’re going to say, ‘I’ve never heard of her.’ But we sort of got into this before, I wanted to ask you first, how are you? And I’m sorry to hear that you’re going through a divorce.

That’s alright, that’s really kind of you. I’m fine. It’s not ideal, but at the same time, you do know, at some point, don’t you, when it should be over. There’s a voice somewhere.

I’ve written about that very thing!

I guess that’s one of the risks of coming out, is that people are going to start quoting your columns back to you, when you ask them how you are.

Yeah. Absolutely. Certainly. And you do know when it’s time to go. I mean, I’m turning that back to you now. I know how painful that is, whether you’re the one who knew you had to go or the other person was, it’s like hell. But there will be better days ahead, Matt.

Yeah, I hope so. I mean, the other thing that’s interesting about your column is, you are quite affirming, and a lot of the advice is about being brave and taking decisions that aren’t easy. And in fact when you are a recently separated 30-year-old man, often there are difficult decisions to be made that aren’t easy. I have made decisions, and in the moment of making those decisions I have thought of your column and thought, ‘Well, this is what Sugar would advise,’ so that’s good. It’s affirming and it’s really helpful. So it’s very nice that you asked how I am. The other thing, in your column, is that you express love for your readers.

There are so many parts of this experience that are weird to me. In my work as a literary writer, even though I think my work is inherently political, I never have a message in mind, my novel doesn’t have a message, but Sugar has a message.

Tell me what that message is.

Yeah, and oddly the self help crap is extremely commercial. And what you’re doing is so far, not. I mean, the writing you do under your own name is, I’m assuming, is giving you some money.

Yeah.

But the writing you’re doing as Sugar, you’ve not been paid for a column.

No.

What are they doing? What are they thinking? I mean, you must be generating three-quarters of their hits by this point.

It’s a little complicated because I work really hard on the column and takes a lot of time. I get so much email, I have thousands of emails from readers. But nobody gets paid at The Rumpus. That’s the thing. And I knew that going in. Stephen Elliott and Isaac Fitzgerald really do the work of the site and Isaac works there full time. They’ve also sold tons of mugs, the ‘write like a motherfucker’ mugs, and so I’m happy that Isaac gets to earn a living wage now. A couple of months ago Stephen and Isaac sent me a thousand dollars, because I think they felt guilty.

And you retain the rights to the column.

I do. So basically my answer to how I get paid is, I’ll get paid eventually if there's a Sugar book. And I’m happy to wait, I mean, I took it on as a lark. I thought it would be an interesting project for me as a writer. There was an old Sugar for the first 26 columns.

Who was it? You can’t tell me, can you?

I don’t know. Well, you’re a reporter, you know.

What was the plan for coming out? When were you going to come out?

I’m going to San Francisco, and I’m going to come out at one of The Monthly Rumpus events.

The Monthly Rumpus. What’s that?

The second Monday of every month they do a big thing at The Makeout Room. And the plan is my next book–one I've written under my own name–will be a Rumpus book club pick, and I’m going to announce that Sugar’s book is going to be the book club pick and Sugar’s going to have a coming out party in San Francisco.

There's also been talk of a book of your Sugar columns.

Yeah. There has been.

And when is that going to come out?

I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

You know, there’s a cricketer named Sachin Tendulkar, and apparently they’ve made, like, 50 copies of a book that’s written in his blood. And it was Saddam Hussein who had a book written in his blood. Saddam Hussein had people come and do blood transfusions and then write the Qu’ran in his blood. I think that you should consider some sort of limited edition copies of a Sugar book.

I think that’s a really interesting idea.

Well, only because, this guy described your work as ‘sacred’ to him. Now I’m not suggesting you should be blaspheming with the production of a Sugar book, but there is an aspect in which this means a lot to people, so… surely, maybe there’s a market… I’m not saying you should bleed for the book.

Well it’s fascinating because a Sugar book is not commercial in a traditional sense. My columns are really long…I have absolutely no limitations placed on me.

And they publish 15 minutes after you send it in, right?

Yeah.

And that’s unusual.

Yeah, nobody fucks with it. I have [Mr. Sugar] read it, and he says yeah, and it goes live. And I usually do it all night long on a Wednesday night, and I curse myself, and it’s tortuous, and I’m pissed, because I think, why didn’t I do this fucking earlier like I said I would do, and I’m always up on this deadline, and it’s really strange because it’s really contrary to everything I’ve ever said about the way one should write with time. But it’s odd, this thing about it not being commercially viable, because the audience is really responding. I mean, people have written to me as [Sugar’s real name] and said amazing things about my work, but as Sugar, the love is unbelievable. The way that people…people write to me and say ‘you changed my life, I thought of you when I was thinking about doing this, you helped me understand something that I’ve been going to therapy for years trying to understand,’ and what’s weird about that is that the gatekeepers have decided that Sugar’s not commercial. But the people have decided that it is.

It’s a revolution!

It is.

Are you jealous of yourself?

That’s a funny thing. I’ve almost joked before on Twitter that Sugar is jealous of her real person because Sugar has more followers, and all that stuff. I think that, I’m not…I think the Sugar fans will go buy the book I've written as myself. What’ll be interesting is beyond that.

Are you concerned that the readership may drop off after you identify yourself? Are you concerned about hostile reactions? Are you concerned about, Oh, well…I mean, I thought you were Judy Blume.

You thought I was Judy Blume? Sugar says she’s 42. I mean, everything I say about myself is true.

So are you concerned about a hostile reaction when you come out?

You’d think I’d get all these private, nasty emails, and I don’t. I’ve gotten maybe two in maybe a year. Sometimes people write to me because they disagree but they’re always very respectful. I’ve had two people that have just been mean but you’d think it was more than that. So: What am I scared of? I’m not scared that people will be hostile. A lot of people have written to me and said they’re scared of finding out who Sugar is because they fear that maybe some of what is happening will stop happening. [Mr. Sugar] was saying ‘I think you should stay anonymous forever, because if you come out, it’s going to ruin that mystique....’ I think that people feel that they can really be open with me because they don’t know who I am. And the longer that we’ve gone down this path, the less I think that’s important. And perhaps it’s because several readers, some of my biggest fans, people who are really really into Sugar, they have this relationship with Sugar, and they’re always emailing me and direct messaging me, and they’ve figured out who I am, and they all said, like, ‘I was afraid I wouldn’t love you as much and I still totally do, it doesn’t matter to me that I know who you are.’ And so I guess I’m going to go on that. But I won’t be Sugar indefinitely. I won't stop being Sugar as soon as I come out, but there will be probably be a time when I decide to stop. The way I write the column, I’m not just Dear Abby or something, I’m not just giving you etiquette advice, I’m really writing about core issues. And I think there’s a point at which I’ve spoken my piece.

You’re sort of…spent.

I’m spent. And also it’ll reach a point where it’s like, ‘see column X,’ you know? And it already feels like that, in some regard, and also the way I write the column, it’s me writing about my life. One thing that’s going to be cool about coming out is I’m going to be able to write about a bunch of stuff that I was scared about writing about before because I just thought it would be too identifying. You can Google any number of things from my columns and probably find myself.

It’s interesting that your husband was pushing you to keep the mystique, too.

What do you think?

I think you should keep the mystique.

You think I should?

Well, I’m a romantic. I don’t doubt that if you do come out, everyone’s going to love it, and I don’t doubt that it’s going to be wonderful for everyone involved. But there is a kind of romance in…like, I love Batman. Batman is my favorite, and Batman and Bruce Wayne couldn’t exist without each other. They couldn’t. But the mystique about Batman is kept because he doesn’t tell anyone who he is. And there’s a great scene, it was on Youtube the other day, where Batman and Bruce Wayne have to have a conversation with each other in front of the commissioner. And there’s this sort of façade, but there’s this sort of beauty to it. Before this interview I was going to say, ‘I should give you some advice.’ And that would be it: Keep it private. But then there’s also, could you still make money if it were private? If I were in your position, I would claim it, I would say, ‘That’s me. Hello. I’m here. And let’s go for it.’ And I think that’s something that a lot of authors are scared to do, to claim their work.

Well there’s also that other thing, actually being Sugar has been a real exercise in ego, and not getting to take credit for something that so many people love. I’ve been at parties and people are like, ‘you have to read this column,’ you know? And I’ll just be like, ‘yeah, okay,’ because you work your whole life for people to love what you write, and then they do, and you have to pretend it’s not you.

But isn’t that an incredible lesson to learn as a writer?

It’s a great lesson.

Whether or not you do come out. You get what you wanted, and it turns out that you can’t take it.

I can’t have it!

And there’s a real wisdom that comes in being able to say, ‘I want to be able to take credit for this.’

Yeah. And I could get paid. The publishers and people would know who I was, and they’d pay me. It is partly a money thing because if I don’t come out as Sugar, then those people don’t buy [Sugar’s real name]’s books. And that bugs me. Meanwhile my book is languishing, and if I just said, then they’d go buy that book.

It’s difficult as an author to be in a position where somebody says, ‘hey, do you want to sell, maybe, 100,000, 200,000 more copies of your novel?’

If I was Bruce Wayne, I’d tell everybody. I’d say, ‘listen mate, I’ve got a cave down there, and you know, some really great outfits.’

You’re fucking Batman!

In life, we all have to come to terms with the fact that we aren’t superheroes or religious figures. And then we have to own that, and then we have to be honest about who we are.

Many years ago I knew a woman who was the mistress of a man who was married to a famous advice columnist. They'd been having an affair for a couple decades by then and the advice columnist knew it was going on, but none of that was ever present in her columns. Never was there a sense of her life’s imperfections and contradictions. But what Sugar does is that Sugar would tell you if her husband had a kept woman for 20 years, so I think that the sense of this grandiose faith that people put in Sugar is not bound up in me saying ‘I know what you should do, and this is what morality demands.’ Instead it’s me saying let’s look at all of these things in this really intricate way, and they’re full of contradictions.

They are. It’s exciting to be on the cusp of this, right?

I’m not that funny in my writing, at all. I’m funny in my life, but in my writing I’m dark, and serious, and emotionally intense. And I thought that I was going to try to be funny in the Sugar column because the person before me was funny, and I thought it would just be a way for me to expand my range. And what ended up happening was I just expanded my range in a different way. And so it’s interesting to me as an artist, it’s the first time that I’ve used memoir, this kind of emotionally intense writing style, this thing that I do, in this other venue, which is the direct address…here’s what I think you should do. It’s a very different sort of address than the fictional address or even the memoir, which is just a very self-contained literary form.

Presumably you have a writing mentor somewhere. You mentioned your husband. Is there anyone else who critiques your work?

I studied with different people along the way. I didn’t get an MFA until I was a writer. Are you 30?

31.

I went to graduate school when I had just turned 30. And I had some good teachers, and I learned from people, but there isn’t one person. There are writers who I read very carefully and with great attention, and I learned from them more than anything. Mary Gaitskill, I read her for a decade, practically memorized her work, and then I worked with her in person for a short time and I had all these fantasies about how intense our relationship would be because I just got her work so deeply, and she was a fine person and a fine human being, but I don’t feel that I learned from Mary the person. It was what it was, but it wasn’t revelatory.

In the way that her writing was?

But presumably you’re going to get out of this debt soon, aren’t you?

Yeah. But it’s tough. I’m still paying off my bachelor’s degree from a public university.

Are there any questions, perhaps, that you’ve not answered, that are sitting there that perhaps you want to answer?

Well, there’s a couple. I have two letters from women who found that they were pregnant and both women wanted to have abortions, but were married to men who they know would try to prevent them from having the abortion, and asking me if it was okay that they went ahead and had the abortion and didn’t tell their husbands. And those are, those are the only…those are the only exceptions that I’ve ever emailed someone privately back and told her what I thought, and didn’t publish it.

Why didn’t you publish it?

I just felt like what I had to say was not really a column. And some of these questions, it’s not just helping people but it’s also building a literary experience around it, and so sometimes I feel like, you know, it doesn’t lend itself to that kind of full-blown column. But it’s also, I guess because my answers to them, my private emails to them were so indecisive. I basically thought along with them and said, yeah, I think this completely sucks, and it could destroy your relationship if you lie to your husband and just go have an abortion without ever telling him. That could be a really bad seed. But at the same time, one can’t have a baby that one doesn’t want to have, right?

And abortion is difficult in America.

I have tons of questions from young people, like 21-year-old kids, who basically they’ve been given everything and have always been told that they’re so great and so talented, and they don’t know what the hell to do with themselves, they have no passions whatsoever, they have no interests, and they’re asking me what they should do. I don’t know. I think they should quit college, and cut themselves off financially from their parents and go work at McDonald’s, actually.

Yeah, you said a few times that you don’t really believe in inherited wealth, that you don’t really believe in that kind of support. And actually that brings me to another question, which maybe you can answer in the same sentence, but do black people write to you, much? Because it struck me that a lot of these issues you just mentioned are the issues faced by white college kids, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And, living in New Orleans, there are plenty of very bright young black people who are not at college for one reason or another, who I think get to figure out what they’re passionate about without some of this, so I was just curious.

Well I can’t tell if black people ask me for advice.

You mean they don’t write in the letter, ‘p.s. I’m black?’

A couple of them do. I do have a couple of letters. But I have a pretty sizeable African-American fanbase, and I just know that based on Twitter and Facebook, you can see the picture of the person, and I just want to clarify, and I know… some of the criticism… that column We Are All Savages Inside about writerly jealousy, and there’s that paragraph where I say ‘I think part of your problem is you’re so entitled,’ and people said I’m so mean, but I don’t think I’d say I don’t believe in inherited wealth. People who grow up with parents who have money are as blameless as the people who grow up with parents who didn’t have money. And certainly as a parent I’m going to give my kids everything I can. But I will tell you that one of the major dilemmas of my life, both [Mr. Sugar] and I grew up working class, weren’t given anything, and both made our way in the world. And as much as I wanted to be the kid who got to go to French immersion camp between my freshman and sophomore year or whatever, but because I wasn’t that kid, I actually think that helped me more than these wonderful educational opportunities that I missed because I was poor. And so that’s the complexity. I don’t mean to condemn people who have access to resources. But I do mean to very seriously say that maybe paying your own electricity bill is the path—is the path out of whatever conundrum you’re in. Maybe just being self-sufficient, that’s the answer.

Matt Davis’s website is matthewcharlesdavis.com.

This conversation took place by Skype and has been condensed.

Photo by Uwe Hermann.

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Let me be clear: I’m totally fine with being lied to. I don’t long to be told what everyone I know truly thought of my play. But in my experience, many of them long to tell me. They may not be conscious of this, but that’s why God invented the unconscious. Deep down, most people really do want to tell me what they thought of my work, one way or another.

Over the years I’ve spoken to enough playwrights to gather that my experience is not unique. Therefore, I’ve prepared a little guide to help you navigate your way through the post-show interaction.

But first, there are people you don’t want to be after seeing your friend’s play.

The Projector
A good friend of mine was coming to see my play Dying City and we planned to see each other afterwards. I used the opportunity to check in on the show, which had been running a while.

I greeted my friend post-show with a big hug, and we expressed pleasure at seeing each other for the first time in ages. Then came the obvious next moment—the moment when someone says something nice about the play they just saw. Only he didn’t say anything—just smiled at me dumbly. Okay, a bit weird, I thought—but maybe he’s waiting to talk about it. So off we went to a nearby watering hole. And in a lull in the small talk my friend turned to me and said: “So what did you think of tonight?”

It takes great skill to use a question about what someone else thought to convey unmistakably what you yourself thought. Only the biggest assholes have this skill.

The Condenser
A colleague and someone I genuinely looked up to waited around the auditorium after one of my early plays, and when I saw him there I scurried over to say hello, eager to hear what he thought. He loved the play, it was remarkable, so moving, so interesting, I was such a wonderful writer… but there was a hesitation in his voice. What was it?

“One thing I didn’t like was the haircut,” he said cryptically.

“The haircut?”

“Of the main character. It should be spikier. It should look more like the hair that people his age have, when I walk around NYU and see these young people.”

“Ah.”

That wasn’t all. My colleague proceeded to talk about what was wrong with the lead character’s haircut for a solid three minutes—five times longer than he took when praising me. In fact, the actor’s haircut was entirely unremarkable. No one else who saw the play ever brought it up; no critic mentioned it. And so I as I sat there in the cold, empty theatre, listening to my colleague drone on and on about it, it became clear that the haircut was actually my play.

The Generalizer
A mentor gives me a big hug at the end of my first New York production.

“I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“Oh—thank you.”

“It’s so clearly your voice.”

“Thanks!”

“You really just wrote something that you wanted to write.”

“Yes…”

That is the generalizer. Ultimately you are left standing in an uncomfortable silence, when you can no longer deny that nothing that is being said to you can unequivocally be understood as praise.

The Magician
The magician disappears at the end of your play. You wait and look for him to no avail. Six months later, when he finally calls or emails to get together, no mention is made of the show. He’s made the play disappear!

The Globalizer
This is the worst of all because the most unexpected. The globalizer—a frequent theatergoer, perhaps a onetime practitioner—gives you a huge hug at the end of your play. He tells you how brilliant it was, how moving, how incredibly brave… you go out into the night feeling warm, protected—even loved.

Then around the second or third drink this happens:

“The problem with the theatre today is that these theatres refuse to take risks.”

Okay. Fair enough. Quite frequently true…

“When’s the last time a major theatre did a truly risky play?”

Yes. Well. You did just see mine…

“They’re terrified of anything authentic. As are critics. If critics like something universally, you know it’s not good.”

Right. Well. My play got pretty good reviews…

“At the end of the day, the theatre is dead.”

Note to fellow playwrights: Never give these people a second chance. They will just keep doing this. Trust me.

Now. If you truly, truly must convey to a playwright that you did not like their play, I have sketched out a few respectful ways to do so. Really—it can be done. And I’m sympathetic. People should not have to go through their entire lives lying about liking bad plays. There has to be a better way. Well, I don’t know if there has to be, but if you really can’t control yourself, be one of these people:

The Diplomat
At the moment of maximum vulnerability after the show, you are polite and kind. On the way to the bar you ask friendly questions about the experience of doing the play. By the end of the first round of drinks, now that you have established that you are basically a caring and compassionate person, you test the waters with a tentative criticism. Something that starts like “I wasn’t sure about…”

You say it in a way that the playwright can choose to pursue or deflect. You note the playwright’s response and direct subsequent comments according to how much he or she has invited further criticism.

The Anti-Narcissist
The narcissist believes his opinions are objective truths. He is afraid of speaking them only because he is afraid that his godlike judgment will irrevocably impact the recipient. And, when the narcissist speaks from on high it often does have this effect—the assumption of absolute authority reawakening one’s lonely, scared inner child.

But the anti-narcissist knows his actual size in relation to others. He knows his opinion is just one person’s point of view, no more or less valid than anyone else’s. And when he speaks, he effortlessly conveys that. When the anti-narcissist says he doesn’t like the play, it almost feels like an act of love. He says in a gentle voice something like, “I’m not sure I always understood what you were trying to say, but I’ll keep thinking about it.” The anti-narcissist knows what he felt but is also suspicious of his own reaction. With him, the playwright experiences a world of compassionate others who are tolerant and accepting even when critical.

The Pal
Which brings me back to where I started. At the end of the day, we all know the truth. We know what it feels like and sounds like. It isn’t something that can be faked. If you didn’t like my play, I’ll know it. And you’ll know I know it. So why not just be a pal? At the end of the show, wrap your arms around me and congratulate me. I’ll know what you really felt. And I’ll be thankful that my friends like and respect me even when they don’t like my work.

Happy theater-going!


Christopher Shinn's new play Picked starts previews April 6 at the Vineyard Theatre.

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Since road trips involve traveling large distances and operating fast-moving motor vehicles, a few steps of precaution are always necessary. But remember: whether it’s driving west on highway 24 from Manhattan, Kansas to see the world’s largest ball of twine, or finally conquering anorgasmia in a dirty motel room with a cowboy or cowgirl who might steal all your money but still looks like Brad Pitt and/or Amy Smart, as long as you follow a few key steps you will, undoubtedly, have the time of your life.

Find a vehicle.
As anyone who’s woken up to a dead car in the motel parking lot knows, your vehicle is the most important part of a road trip. Other modes of transportation can stand in from time to time, but keep in mind a trip from Boston to California on a Greyhound Bus is not a road trip, it is a Greyhound trip (and also an exercise in the kind of misery that comes with smelling McDonald’s for ten days straight).

Likewise, if you decide to hitchhike, this is not technically a road trip so much as the manifestation of your subconscious desire to become a victim. If you decide you must engage in hitchhiking, make sure you bring along a friend, carry mace or other defensive weaponry, and perform your hitchhiking in a place where you know the local language or at least some key phrases such as “No, I am not looking to perform sex with you in exchange for a ride in your small European car.” (This last one is a lesson I learned once while trying to hitchhike with a friend through Croatia).

I know nothing about car machinery, but will wager that you should probably at least get your car inspected by a mechanic before leaving. Because no matter how many times you’ve re-read The Secret, positive visualization will never fix a broken fan belt, and an optimistic outlook won’t fill your gas tank if you run out in the middle of a desert highway. I hear AAA is helpful, as is learning how to change a flat tire. Oh, and don’t rent from Rent-A-Wreck. As I learned one cold morning in that motel parking lot in Delaware, their name is an exercise in honesty, not irony.

Get real about yourself.
There are two types of road trip people. The kind that are focused on getting from point A to point B as fast as possible; usually folks who are either moving to a new state, travelling with a dog or are deathly afraid of flying. They take no joy in the eccentricities of America, such as Hooper, Colorado's Alien Watchtower, or The World’s Tallest Uncrucified Christ located in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. They’ll also usually end up dragging you by your hair out of the Stax Museum of Soul in Memphis, should you take too long staring at the album art on the first release of “Do The Funky Chicken.”

The other type of person is the one for whom the road trip is all about experience. They will undoubtedly want to stop at every antique store/junk yard, will drag you to the Rock Animal Zoo in Scottsboro, Alabama, and think it’s “cute” to get dinner in the biker bar off route 12 they read about in American Motorcyclist. While they bring a sense of joy and adventure to every trip, they must be watched, for if left to their own devices they’ll spend a full week looking for that ghost town that was supposed to be just off of route 161 in Nevada.

The key to finding a balance between the two is to set yourself a schedule, chose a few key sights ahead of time, while leaving some room for flexibility. Sure, you can plan on taking 66 from Las Vegas to LA, but you should also be willing to acknowledge that you are not going to bust on in to Area 51 and you will probably not enjoy walking the perimeter for hours.

Bring a friend.
Certain people (killers, bank robbers, secretaries who just stole money from their boss, authors on book tour) may prefer to take a road trip on their own. But there are many benefits to bringing a friend along with you. There’s someone there to make sure you don’t fall asleep while driving, or get stabbed at a rest stop. They can share the experience, take photos of you at cheesy tourist traps and they'll be there later to reminisce.

This friend should have a valid driver’s license and also zero, absolutely no warrants out for their arrest in the states you’ll be driving through. While it first may add a sense of adventure when your college friend tells you to be careful while driving through Texas because they’re wanted in that state for drug charges, you’ll soon find that obeying all traffic laws and driving below the speed limit grows tiresome. Also you get pulled over quite a bit in Texas.

The person you choose should also be someone whose company you can stand for more than a few hours at a time, and ideally, will have the same approach to the road trip as you do. Note that although taking a road trip with a new romantic partner can seem like a fun and exciting idea at first, the rigors of daily ten-hour drives can put stress on even the most promising of relationships. Unless you’re setting it up as a test to see if someone has marriage potential, I would recommend against choosing a partner you’re not yet comfortable being really gassy with in close quarters.

Also he or she should have a functional credit card.

Make a plan of how you and your friend will avoid killing each other.
The stories that come from road trips are full of adventure and excitement. Memory is like that! But the experience itself consists mainly of driving for hours and hours on endless, nondescript highway. Sure, the occasional confederate flag or Kenny’s Roadside Farmhouse of Horrors may add a little spice to the journey, but for the most part, roadtrips are, like meditation, incredibly boring. So your imagination might begin to find new and dangerous ways of keeping yourself occupied, like wondering why your road trip partner insists on breathing so loudly through his mouth or how she keeps putting her to-go styrofoam cup in your coffee holder.

Music can be key in this endeavor—a good playlist will keep you going for a few hours at least. I personally prefer a heavy dose of hair metal, as nothing beats the rush you get from singing along to Def Leppard at the top of your lungs while pumping the gas pedal in time with guitar riffs and speeding past suckers in slower cars, at least until you get pulled over. But you should go with the music that inspires you. Pick things that make sense for the terrain, such as Johnny Cash if you’re in Tennessee or Reno; or John Denver if you’re driving through the Rockies. The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan also make great all-terrain soundtracks.

Another option is books on tape—an incredible way to learn something while ensuring you don’t commit first degree murder over that extra-loud bag of Sunchips. Driving from Texas to New York City, I did Kafka’s Metamorphosis and began (though didn’t finish) War and Peace.

Pick a route.
A good road trip should always choose a direction, but still leave room for improvisation. In college, my boyfriend and I once decided to take a road trip to the beach. Never mind that it was 11 p.m., or that we didn’t exactly know where the beach was. We couldn’t find water bottles to take, so instead we filled up a bucket and hoped it didn’t spill. We only had credit cards instead of cash, so we ended up writing checks for 25 cents at all the toll booths. And since we hadn’t thought to bring a map, we ended up trying to decipher where a beach might be on the poster of New Jersey provided at a rest stop. We did finally, in the pitch black around 2 a.m., find something that looked like a beach, and spent a romantic night cuddled in sleeping bags underneath the stars—only to be awoken in the morning by a few gruff men with pickup trucks. Our lovely “beach” wasn’t a beach at all. It was in fact a small inlet designed to help cool the nearby nuclear power plant. (Let’s hear it for New Jersey!)

If there’s a lesson in this, it’s to always know to at least some degree where you are going. A major (or minor!) city makes a lovely destination, as do any of the colorful alien-, ghost- and oddity-centric attractions listed at Roadside America.

Maps are also key. A GPS device works as well, but will often steer you towards the most direct, not the most interesting, route. Still: not knowing where you’re going at all leads to a strong chance you’ll wind up driving in circles, or worse, end up in a strip mall. You can always ask directions, but be wary. People rarely tell you what you really want to know.

For God's sake, bring some money.
As anyone can tell you who’s ever sped down the Garden State Parkway, tossing nickels into the toll catchers and hoping the authority won’t notice, money is an important part of a road trip. You should always have cash on hand for things like breakfast, gas and bribes. Remember, you can’t bargain on the price of that wagon wheel rocking chair if you’re trying to pay with a credit card.

As the national system of ATMs and banking options is a bit screwy, it’s advisable to withdraw a large sum of money ahead of time to ensure you have cash on hand. You should also create a budget for your trip, as things can get expensive quickly. Planning for the amount of money you’ll need is easy: multiply the number of miles you’ll be driving times the mileage of the car times the average price of gas in each state, allowing for any oil spills and/or new international wars that might raise/lower prices, then add in the cost of hotels and food. You’ll be spending about 10% more than that.

Plan to sleep.
The most fantastic Best Western in the country lies just off the Pacific Coast Highway, just south of Big Sur. It features oceanfront views, and rooms with fire-pits and jacuzzis. Unfortunately, a night in this Best Western will run you about $450 a night—unless you book it online ahead of time. Don’t learn this lesson the same way I did: at 11 p.m. with no backup plan. Trust me, you’ll instead end up staying at the abandoned Seabreeze motel across the street, where bargaining for a room may not get you a better price, but it will get you an upgrade to the one room with a minifridge. It’s usually reserved for customers with severe medical needs, as I confirmed upon opening the fridge and finding the forgotten dialysis supplies of the previous resident.

(It's also good to have a sense of what's going on where you're going. Off to Key West? Maybe look online to find out if 10,000 bikers are also coming to town! You may or may not think this is awesome.)

If you can, book a hotel room ahead of time, at least for one or two of the nights. You should also know where the Motel 6s and Super 8s are along your route. They’re guaranteed to be at least a little better than the by-the-hour motel down the street.

If you plan on sleeping in the car or camping, research where the designated areas to do so are located. Bring a tent and sleeping bags, and do not, under any circumstances, engage in a sexual act while sleeping in a car on the side of the highway.

Emergencies will happen. It's okay.
Let’s say you’re driving through Kingman, Arizona and get a flat tire on the side of the road. Perhaps, knowing nothing about cars, you decide to wander into the desert while your friend is busy fixing the tire. In the tumbleweeds, you spot a trailer in the distance, and decide to venture closer for a better look. Within 100 feet, however, a few heads pop out of the trailer windows. Shouting ensues. The motor starts and they start driving directly towards you, whooping, pointing, everyone brandishing something that may or may not be a small weapon. Let’s say when this starts happening you decide to run, jumping over bushes all the way back to the highway, glancing over your shoulder and remembering the advice your friend’s dad who’s a cop once told you: it’s harder to hit a moving target. When you return to your car, the trailer in hot pursuit, you find that your friend has successfully fixed the flat and is ready to speed away. Now, in that circumstance, won’t you be glad you kept that spare tire in the trunk, instead of removing it to make room for your suitcase like you’d been planning to?

In road trips, as in life, it’s a fact: as soon as you stop preparing and assume everything will be fine is exactly when the worst will happen. The only way to combat this is to prepare for the absolute worst. Emergency gas, food, water, a first aid kit, a car charger for your cell phone. Pack flares, and maybe some light weaponry such as (legal-sized!) knives and pepper spray. Seriously: bring a fishing rod, in case you get stuck in the woods having to forage your own food. There’s even an iPhone app now that tells you which mushrooms are edible and which ones will kill you. The more disasters for which you plan, the less likely it is that anything bad will happen. It's a law!

Also keep in mind that most isolated trailers in the middle of the desert are probably meth labs filled with extremely angry armed people.

Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, in this case Gillette; advertisers do not produce the content.

Erica Sackin is our Spandex Report columnist, which focuses on the lives of the young, so she would know. She is also the proprietor of Erica Saves the Day.

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