When my friends started having children, as much as I thought about what role I'd play in their kids' lives, it was as the sort of friend of the family who, when you're teetering through teenagerdom and your early 20s, takes you out to lunch or dinner (often arriving, fortuitously, when you're most off course and down-at-heel), gives you Rilke and Asimov and the Brontes at the junctures when they can do their most good, takes your ambitions seriously, lets you be yourself while providing some calibrating sense of what the world at large will eventually expect from your conversation, etc. I had a couple such 'aunts' myself, my mom's [...]
The conclusion of a month-long series on terrible trips, great journeys and getting lost.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was 1996, and I was still imagining myself to be some sort of actor. I had acted in a play written by a charismatic young playwright and directed by my best friend and roommate the summer previous, a four-hander, as they say. The playwright, also the star of the piece, decided that he was going to take the show on the road. For three weeks. And, on top of that, one of the roles would be recast with my girlfriend at the time, "Erin." [...]
Part of a two-week series on the pull of bad influences in our lives and in the culture.
I don’t remember all that much about my first year at university except that it was the year we converted from pounds, shillings and pence to "decimal currency." I shared ground-floor rooms, overlooking the Third Quad in college, with a bearded, bear-like chap I called (for reasons which need not detain us) Eighty Two. He was impossibly good: for all practical purposes a saint. His father ran a school for the blind. He had just spent part of his gap year (though the term wasn’t in use back then) in a 12th-century [...]
This series is brought to you by TurboTax Federal Free Edition. Mike: So, Logan, I heard that after we left the bar last night, I went home to go to bed, and you went back to your neighborhood in Brooklyn and got more drinks?
Logan: Well, that is almost true. I went back to our friend Adam's neighborhood and got one more drink, and also some macaroni and cheese, yes. That happened.
Mike: Oh.
Logan: I'm guessing that you're interested in this fact because you think there are other things I could have spent that $26 on! ($6 for the drink, $10 for the mac and cheese, and [...]
Dear Jen,
I'm sorry for telling you that your allergies were psychosomatic.
