Do you know how much coffee will kill you? I think this video will tell you, but I am about to find out through personal experimentation. I AM SO TIRED THIS MORNING. Anyway, here is some learning for you to do about caffeine.

“David Foster Wallace was right: Irony is ruining our culture”

“Hookers are using the controversial Airbnb home-sharing Web site to turn prime Manhattan apartments into temporary brothels,” while “[c]rafty hobos are turning the Manhattan Bridge into a veritable shantytown, complete with elaborate plywood shacks that are truly ‘must see to believe.’” It is, indeed, a hell of a town.

Here’s a look at how six great independent bookstores make it in the big city, which is actually a question I have always wanted answered. The Park Slope Community Bookstore has done it in part by catering to Park Slope’s child-related needs, which seems obvious; BookCourt did it by buying their building and, eventually, the building next door. PowerHouse Arena, as anyone who goes to things knows, does it by tirelessly having things to go to (and lots and lots of space rental). The lovely Greenlight books did it through canny investment and fundraising and by being a bookstore where a bookstore was needed. And Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson does it by selling a crapload of books:

She attributes more than $4 million in sales last year to an obvious factor: volume. “Instead of getting rid of shelf for display,” she says, “we’ve gotten rid of display space for shelf space.” So 65,000 books have been squeezed into 7,000 square feet (along with a café), while creative organizing keeps them compulsively browsable.

My only complaint about these bookstores is that, with the exception of BookCourt’s cat (pictured!), there aren’t enough cats in them.

by Niesha Davis

It was Christmas Day, my last day in Thailand, and I was looking for something to make my trip extra special. I roamed the streets of Chiang Mai, listening to Drake’s “The Motto” on my iPod, and I thought about how great those last few weeks had been, and how great the last few months had been in general. After four years on and off in New York City, I had made the decision to move to South Korea to teach English. Making the decision had been rough, and I had a hard time coming to terms with leaving the city. Brunches on Saturdays, partying in the evenings, smoking myself into a purple haze during the week, cookies from Milk Bar: I had carved out a decent little life for myself. Sure, I worked at a cupcake shop part-time and could barely make ends meet, but I was living it up in New York, one of the most diverse, most fun places ever. How could I possibly leave?

I loved the city, and also I had to admit that it just wasn’t giving me what I needed. If I didn’t want to be in my late twenties still living with two roommates that I didn’t know and couldn’t stand, I was going to have to put on my big girl panties and make some real decisions. Friends had been telling me for years what a great opportunity teaching in Asia could be. Still, I dragged my feet for almost a full year before things finally swung into motion. A part of me was excited for the possibility of life in a foreign land again, but another part of me was scared and kind of tired of moving and having to restart my life. Over the course of seven years I had lived in San Francisco, New York, and Amsterdam. I loved my time in each city but being so transient does have its downsides. Sometimes it feels as if I have no roots. Constantly moving makes relationships, friendships and romantic ones, difficult. Plus, I was kind of annoyed that I couldn’t make things happen a bit faster in New York. I finally powered through and started really looking for positions overseas in January of 2013, secured a job in July, left the city in August to spend a month at home in Cleveland, and moved to Korea in September of 2013. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

That morning, as my Christmas break was coming to an end, I thought about all the things I could get into. I could go ride an elephant, or take pictures with tigers, I could even go ziplining. Thailand has no shortage of tourist traps for the adventurous traveler with money to blow. None of those options seemed quite right. As I zig-zagged through the side streets I came across a tattoo shop.

“A new tattoo, that could be interesting,” I thought to myself. It’d been years since my last tattoo — Liz Phair song lyrics on the side of my hip. My first tattoos, a rose and a butterfly, I had mostly gotten for decoration. When I turned 22 I decided to get something more meaningful. After some deliberation I settled on words from “Extraordinary,” one of my favorite songs growing up. At the time I thought the lyrics, Average everyday sane psycho supergoddess, would make me feel some sort of way. I thought I would feel free, empowered, more womanly, and less like the scared, insecure girl I was back then. The tattoo did nothing for me. I was the same person afterwards. In hindsight I understand that my lack of belief is why nothing changed inside of me. It’s not enough to just slap something on your body permanently, you have to believe in and embody the words. After that, I left tattoos alone for the next few years. But recently I had been toying with the idea of getting something new. I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted. I’m not the type of person to just run out and get permanent art on my body for no reason, so I held off. When the time was right it would happen.

When I was living in Amsterdam, I knew plenty of people who got ink to commemorate their trip. At the time I thought they were silly. Why would someone get something so trivial to remind them of such a small part of their life? Now I thought that I was the silly one. Experiences are only as special as you make them. There isn’t anything goofy about wanting to remember something that feels important, be it with a picture or a tattoo.

This Thai tattoo shop, slightly bigger than your average American bathroom, had pictures of the artist’s work plastered all over. I knew I didn’t have time for anything big and intricate, so I decided on something smaller — perhaps some more meaningful song lyrics or maybe an affirmation of some sort? Almost as a joke, I thought: “What if I got YOLO tattooed on me? Wouldn’t that be a hoot?”

Since “you only live once” was repackaged by Drake in “The Motto,” YOLO quickly become a catchphrase for youth and hip-hop communities. It’s also thought of as the carpe diem of stupid people. While I definitely don’t agree with that description, when people do stupid things and post them to Twitter with #yolo, well, who can blame the naysayers?

But YOLO’s not to blame. People have been behaving in stupid or reckless ways, including on Twitter, well before YOLO was even a thing. The only difference between me doing something I might regret and my parents doing things they surely still regret is there was no Facebook or Twitter to document the stupidity.

The whole YOLO moment kind of went over my head. I tend to shy away from movements of any kind, be they political or pop cultural. But once I started seeing YOLO as a punchline in articles and TV shows, I couldn’t figure out why it was getting such a bad rap. YOLO seems like such a positive affirmation, something not deserving of such a negative disdain. Expressing the idea of living life acknowledging that you only live once sure isn’t new; it actually dates at least to the 1700s. But now that the hip-hoppers have latched on to it, suddenly people are having such a problem with it? YOLO didn’t ignite the stupidity of teenagers. It seems more likely that people see it as having “sold out,” now that the youth and hip-hop heads have gotten their grubby little hands on it.

Negative connotations totally overshadowed any good that could come. It came to a head when snowboarder Iouri Podladtchikov, nicknamed Ipod, won the gold medal in the men’s half-pipe competition by landing his signature move, the YOLO flip. Despite winning a gold medal in the Olympics, something most of us can only dream of doing, he still got brutal disdain. At Salon, Jen Chaney wrote: “Aren’t there rules that specifically disqualify any athlete who uses the term Yolo in a competitive context? If there aren’t: shouldn’t there be?” Yes, definitely, let’s strip him of his medal.

I too almost drank this particular Kool-Aid. But I had to stop and think: when we start shaming people or writing them off because we don’t understand how they could identify or get something positive out of a specific motto, movement, or affirmation, we’ve gone around the bend.

Honestly the idea of a YOLO tattoo had popped in my head several times over the past few months. I just couldn’t bring myself to take the plunge. What would people think? I’m a grown woman. How could I possibly get the most hated phrase of the last few years branded on me? I’d probably be a laughingstock every time it showed. But then I started thinking: Worrying about what others thought of me wasn’t very YOLO of me, was it? Why would I care about what strangers thought of me enough to keep me from doing something that I wanted to do? A new tattoo wasn’t going to inspire me to go drunk driving and write about it on Tumblr. It’s a damn good motto to live by.

In a lot of ways, I had been living small. I was afraid to really branch out and do all of the things I dreamed about. I really did have to start living each day like it was my last. That’s when life began to blossom for me.

I felt great when I sat down in that chair and watched my tattoo artist prep my skin. I wasn’t getting YOLO tattooed on me because I wanted to be cool or hip or whatever. I was getting it done because I believed it. YOLO’s probably a fad, a hashtag on its way out. For me, it’s something that I’ll always carry with me. Literally.

Niesha Davis is a writer who has written for Bust, Bitch, Time Out Amsterdam, Xojane, The Toast, Clutch, and other publications. She currently resides in South Korea. Keep up with her on twitter @nieshasharay.

★★★★★ Sun came in high through the leafless street trees and went glancing everywhere. The waters of the New Jersey wetlands were lightly ruffled. Someone’s large-screen portable device caught the light and sent a retina-hurting beam across the train car. The phragmites and the trees and the gravel of the rail bed were all brown. A few miles later, dustings of pale green began flashing by, and trees were tipped with red. Somewhere before Princeton, the lawns were green. Deer grazed on a field fuzzed green with new growth. The green smudges became patches; the patches became swaths. On the way into 30th Street Station, broken glass twinkled on the embankment. The cab driver let the road breeze battle with the Christian rock radio till highway speeds made it untenable. The college students had given themselves over to shorts. University-logo banners stretched and filled, conveying their intended unifying visual theme. The basement air conditioning was mortuary. There was day enough to absorb a missed train, and a delayed train after that one. Swarming shells of rowers darkened the river. The vernal gradient passed in reverse. A touch of haze kept the sky from being entirely flawless. Lower Manhattan showed in full color in the right-hand distance on the way through Newark. In town and uptown, outside Alice Tully Hall, a brass band flared, the white sousaphone fiberglass agleam. From the dinner table, the children exclaimed over the crossing contrails as they went from to silver to pink, then finally lost the light and vanished.

“It’s just a chicken with its nuts cut off.”

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

[come to me, sweet stranger]

come to me, sweet stranger, and make of me a moment, a nostalgia, to give
to the wind, to give to the one, who is standing there, at the meeting place,
where the safety is immense, and not to tangle with, where the sentence
can arrive, as though through a spaciousness, surrounding her, through its
particulars, through its split, integument, intangible, what she will take,
what she will have, to wander, with, over the paths, with their names in
tow, in time, a morning, a motive,

come to me, sweet stranger, and make of me a ruthlessness, out of the fatigue,
a furlough or a breathlessness, to gather into the hands, to hone or hammer,
hurry, though, redemptive, as the gaze, untraceable, as the contagion,

come to me, sweet stranger, and make of me a henceforth, further, I am
willing to make it one, pronounceable, convinced of its own, utter,
patternlessness, through the wave, of inhumanity, throughout, the future,

come to me, sweet stranger, and make of me a yearning, out of the likelihood,
a line, to splinter, upwards, nearly, through the enlightenment, through its
trance, of tears, through barrenness, whiteness, to seize, the abruptness,

come to me, sweet stranger, and make of me a timing, to tow a way with, to
rival, like catastrophe, as if starting back from, to take away, foolishness,
from the beginning, from loneliness, from the atrocity,

come to me, sweet stranger, and make of me a lightness, a music, sweeps
through, much in the way of, wonder, originates, on the whim, which collapses,
underneath the weight, where there was none, to arrange, to redeem,

throughout, to begin with, tenderness

Lisa Lubasch is the author of four collections of poetry, including Twenty-One After Days. Her book So I Began is forthcoming. She co-edits the press Solid Objects.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“We like to blame the internet because it lets us off the hook. But it’s a bit like an alcoholic making a bottle of whisky bear the responsibility for his having drunk it, or a drug addict blaming her dealer for selling her a fix of heroin. The web is undoubtedly — pardon the rehab speak — a great facilitator for those of us who have a tendency towards distraction, and it is to blame for myriad pains in the buttocks: ‘lolcats’, ‘selfies’, ‘vaguebooking’, endless bloody passwords, endless bloody pictures of people’s coffee, know-it-all commenters, the phrase ‘Is this really news?’ (as used by aforementioned know-it-all commenters), viruses, perverts, Viagra spam, porn for the perverts to watch with their Viagra spam.”
 — There was more but I felt like I had gotten all I needed at the end of this list.

When I am in one of my more positive frames of mind I like to tell myself to focus on how remarkable it is that Eels have actually been able to be as big as they are rather than wondering what it says about the world that they aren’t bigger. Either way, I am glad they’re still at it. Sometimes just sticking around is a victory. Enjoy. [Via]