Men Without Women (Short Stories) by Haruki Murakami — No Time to Hurt Amazing how the person of your dreams comes along when you’re in the abyss of loneliness. I didn’t know how sad I was until you were here. All that loneliness has given you actual momentum. …

Summarizing the Unsummarizable — I lived in Madrid for seven months last year. Since COVID shut down travel to other provinces for about four of those months, I had time on my hands. I went from feeling a bit stuck to making huge historical and relational journeys, all infused by museums, copious public transport…

Room and Board at a Friendly Institute of Pronunciation — Even though English is the world’s most well-traveled tongue, the language of international business and diligent hoards of teenage students, it sure has maddeningly inconsistent pronunciation rules. English is considered more solid grammar-wise than Spanish, but how to say things in English is another thing altogether. As we know, Great…

Ways Spain Has Been Fantástico — And How the U.S. Still Kicks Butt — The adage is true — one of the best ways to better understand your own country is to travel to another. You don’t know what you’ve got until you’re gone. Abroad. Spain has gotten my attention and 110% of my energy for the past few weeks. Some things are better…

I’m writing this in my sleep — A Tail Wind in Perseverance After an almost 4-day journey from Portland, OR to Madrid, Spain, which included two red-eye flights, a night near Times Square, and a full day in the Casablanca airport (too tired to do anything but pledge to return to Morocco under more pleasant conditions), I will say that 1) the…

But a Reversal Works for Everyone — From the multitudinous sources containing so many stories for this article on small business diversity, one stat stuck out during the pandemic-Black-owned small businesses shut down at twice the overall rate of U.S. enterprises. This, coupled with the larger fact that the average Black person has 1/10th the wealth of…

The Non-Easy Way — If you could change your first name to something the authorities are aware of and friends are on the up and up about, what would you change it to? Moving on from the name we got from our parents is not something a lot of us have pondered. It’s a…

To Miss a Place You Haven’t Even Left — Portland, Oregon has been very, very good to me. World’s biggest bookstore, nation’s biggest city park, a fantastic bike and tango scene and hundreds of miles of uninterrupted public beaches along the Pacific a mere hour and a half away. Not to mention supportive, long-term friends, open-minded politics and foodie…

Being More Open as a Mindset — I came across this quote today while reading Show Your Work by Austin Kleon: “Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to ‘watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of…