How I adore this time of year. Crisp temperatures, rediscovered sweaters, picturesque woodlands, and carte blanche to watch marathons of vile and twisted slasher flicks. I’m not talking about the modern mainstream attempts, with their smokescreen marketing, ludicrous dialogue and casts ripped straight from the “Just Get Through Your Lines as Quickly as Possible and […]

“So tell us about your boyfriend. How did you two meet?”
I’m sitting by a tepid river at Singapore’s only “American Style” microbrewery. Around me perch four American women, all of whom are happy to start their late-afternoons with some solid drinking. Around us, men in the universal business casual uniform - tailored black or […]

It’s funny how New York transforms into a kinder, gentler place after a 14-hour flight. All my usual social barriers are demolished, all the unconscious defense mechanisms rendered impossible as I lurch off the plane, my face pure jet-lagged anemia tinged with airsick green. The customs and immigration official, a beefy man with a shiny […]

“It’s a pretty easy life when you think about it,” one of my dinner companions says with a sweeping gesture. Between the thick Australian accent and mouthfuls of Kingway beer (never Fosters; “Only Americans drink that shit,” he tells me), I’m registering his words on a 3-second time delay. We’re sitting in Hong Kong’s Soho, […]

When I was a lawyer, obsessing over monthly billables and spending at least twenty minutes every night calculating how many more hours I’d have to average per day in order to make my quota and/or bonus, I lamented not being able to travel, just take off and leave, regardless of schedules, approved dates or number […]

In case you’re wondering what it is I’ve been doing with my time (besides freelancing for whatever magazine or journal that will have me, finding creative ways to sell off my belongings, banging out sporadic blog posts, banging out 1,000 words in my manuscript, editing and re-writing said 1,000 words until my eyes bleed, pushing […]

It’s just too fantastic. Living manifestations of the absurdity that is the American (and British) legal systems. Here we have the sordid bastard child of technology and modern sociology, sacrificed to the gods of hand-held communications systems, wrapped in a lovely tort law ribbon. I’ve written about Blackberries before, that hot superiority injection they shoot […]