After 2 nights in the hostel, I started to notice itchy patches of bug bites on my skin. I ascribed it to mosquitos: I was spending a fair amount of time walking around outside, and a fair amount of that walking had been through the vegetation of Pere Lachaise. It wasn’t until my 4th night,…
Month: May 2017
There is Always a Solution
One of the traps of depression is the way it can at times obfuscate what should be obvious. This is why I sometimes need to remind myself that no matter how drained I’ve been for however long, no matter how difficult it is to get through life from day to day, there is always a…
Queen of Our World
I led a charmed life with my parents. My mother was a bell-ringer working in IT and my father was in academia. They traveled often. When I was an infant, my parents took this as their chance to take me around the world before I started school and my world became more narrow. They took…
The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 4)
When, on the 4th evening, I returned to the hostel to find that not only was bed 13 still occupied, but bed 7 now had a new occupant as well, I was not remotely surprised. Fortunately, it was in the evening during regular hours before anyone was asleep. There were only 3 other girls already…
Finding an Easy Fallback Exercise
For days when I don’t necessarily have all the energy to throw myself into some exercise, I need a fallback. Ever since I began exercising regularly, my formerly erratic living habits have become more predictable. In a depressive episode, I find it harder to exercise, and I grow hungrier as though my body is trying…
Queen of Our Kingdom
As much as I felt, as a child, that my life began with my sisters’ birth, that was not at all the case. The first five years of my life were eventful (though not as dramatically as the year of my sister’s birth), and shaped my life in ways I did not comprehend as a…
The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 3)
On my third night, I once again returned to the hostel past 1AM—and once again, I found my bunk occupied. Without so much as setting down my bags, I returned downstairs to reception to inform them, expecting to find that my bed assignment had been unexpectedly changed once more. However, to our mutual bewilderment, my…
When All Else Fails…Hedgehogs!
From a PR perspective, having upload schedules is a great thing. Even from a self-management point of view, working toward a deadline ensures a constant flow of production, no matter how arbitrary the deadlines may be. That said, this series is the hardest for me to keep to a schedule. Some days, I find myself…
You’re Going to Be a Sister!
I wrote a lot as a child. Once, on a trip to America over summer, a childhood friend of mine showed me an autobiography she was writing in the third person for an assignment. I was immediately intrigued. I wanted to write my own. So I tried, and tried again. It never felt quite right,…
The Hostel in Paris (Pt. 2)
I barely slept on my first night in the hostel. I fell asleep past 4 and was woken by the clamor around the room just past 6:30. I went downstairs for breakfast only to find, to my disappointment, that they served only coffee without mugs, orange juice that tasted more like fanta than orange, cereal…