I was twenty-six, hungry, and deeply confused. I had walked into a trattoria in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood with exactly three Italian phrases memorized: hello, thank you, and the number seven. I do not know why I knew the number seven. It just stuck. I sat down, the waiter handed me a menu with no pictures, […]
I remember the exact moment I realized I had been paying for flights like a sucker. I was sitting in a cramped middle seat, somewhere over Missouri, eating pretzels that tasted like salted cardboard and watching the guy in front of me recline into my kneecaps. The flight had cost me $487. I had paid
I used to be a checked-bag person. Not by choice, exactly, but by conviction. I believed, with the fervor of a religious convert, that there was no way a human being could survive a two-week trip with anything smaller than a medium-sized suitcase. I would stand at my bedroom door, staring at a mountain of
