Nijiya has good food

On Monday I was at the rheumatologist for a check up  and decided to swing by Nijiya on Post Street to pick up a few bento boxes for the family.

Hands on the wheel

I’m reading Build the Life You Want – written by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah (!) for the new year. I picked it up from the library on a day where my daughter and I swore off our devices, just to see how addicted we were to our screens. Last year was a time of […]

Midlife friendships

I have three or four texts with once-close-friends. They’re all messages where we try to catch up and rekindle something about our friendships. We were once close and yet – and yet – for the past decade or so, I’ve never felt more adrift from them. One day you look up and the friends with […]

Photoshop’s Generative AI & Memories

I remember taking this photo vividly in December 2013. Christen and I were in a little town near Mrauk U, on the edge of Myanmar near the Indian Ocean and up the Lemro River. It was late afternoon. We were crossing a bridge, feet throbbing from a day of exploring the bewildering complex of 15th-century […]

Pulau Bidong

A recent text with an acquaintance made me realize that I should write down what I remember of my experiences in refugee camps. In my twenties, I remembered many more details but now, like dew at daybreak, those memories are faint. Tuan’s soon-to-be published memoir, Remembering Water, speaks to his “experiences of returning to Vietnam, […]

I miss

I miss sinking into a beat-up sofa in a musty coffeeshop, green awning, on the corner of my rental stoop in Park Slope, opening a book. I miss drinking coffee not for the taste but for the feeling it gave me. I miss a summer when I didn’t have a career and couldn’t have predicted […]