Travel – The Warbler Books

On Travels and Withdrawal

September 19, 2017 2 Comments

Is it possible to experience withdrawal from a trip? It must be, since I’ve been feeling symptoms that I’d label withdrawal since returning from Europe about four weeks ago. It’s likely a combination of things: my partner, her brother, and most of our friends were away at a Certain Desert Shenanigans festival, leaving me plenty of time with my thoughts; and I just started a new job, so even though I’ve got plenty of time to myself, most of it has been consumed with adjusting to the implications of that new role. But that isn’t an explanation of why I’m feeling the way I feel. It’s the setting in which those feelings have the opportunity to metastasize. To grow tentacles and explore the boundaries of their cage, to prod and test the limits of their power over my day to day. It might seem strange to bestow agency and cancerous

A Pivotal Moment, a Wobbly Boat, and Adventure

August 8, 2017 2 Comments

I’m sitting in a cafe-slash-brewery-slash-eatery on the corner of Frederikinkatu and another long-named street. It’s just about 6pm, and the sun is beaming on a diverse, alive, beautiful city I’m visiting for the first time. Helsinki is breathtaking and relatable. It is ancient and new. Also, it has pulled moose sandwiches, which…like…I mean, moose. To eat. They’ve also got some fantastic vegan options, but that’s neither here nor there. The Writing Excuses Retreat ended on…was that Saturday? It’s hard to say, because time has blurred on this trip, but I’ve been in Helsinki a couple days now, and though I’m not even halfway through processing the wonder that was the writing retreat, I do have something I thought would be fun to share with you. As we were preparing to disembark from our ship—and summarily delayed in that, of course—I began writing a poem, inspired by Dr. Seuss, about my experience. While

The Second Half / What 13 Years Can Do

January 9, 2012 5 Comments

Hopefully, friend, the last posts were to your liking. This one will be slightly different, as the experience of traveling alone in Israel was fairly different from being taken around from place to place in a bus. Both experiences were completely valid and wonderful in their own ways. A sizable group from the birthright trip extended their trips, most of us planning to head straight for Tel-Aviv, so a pile of us got on the train at Ben-Gurion and headed to the city. I was getting fairly sick by this point (some food poisoning I believe, but I’ll spare you the details) so I spent the next couple of days in a hostel, trying to sleep off the sickness. Once I was up for it, I bid my fellow birthrighters adieu and took the train north, where I intended to spend the next 3 days in my old village, visiting

Welcome Home

January 5, 2012 No Comments

On a cross country flight At the end of an international journey At my eleven o’clock In a Deere Tractor hat Vest designed to hold spare ammo One of those neck-bound sensitive document holders Watched the O’Reilly factor Pulling out exclusively non-apple gadgets Tap-tap-tapping away at photos of Blond haired blue eyed children We enter California from the west Promptly pulling out your radiation meter Snapping photos at 2.6 2.4 0.9 0.2 (January 6th 2012, 12:14 am EST, flying over california)

Birthright: redux / “Be Ready for the Longest Post Yet”

January 5, 2012 6 Comments

Indeed, dear reader. The previous entry, nigh on half-completed, was lost. The lord of shadowed things saw fit to rob me of my work and by extension you, dear reader, of the enjoyment of reading it. May his days be numbered, that we might again enjoy bloggéd things in the freedom of open sunlight. Alright, enough of that. Back to the topic at hand. Birthright! Wow. What an experience! Birthright ended up being amazing. A time I won’t ever forget. I hope the friends of mine preparing to embark on their own birthright trips have experiences as wonderful as mine. Before getting into it though, I should like to open with an admission: I did not go into birthright totally open-minded. I assumed I wouldn’t connect to the experience or to my traveling companions, and that my purpose in going was to travel to Israel on a free ticket, with

A Return to the Motherland / An Open Letter to the Woman Who Sat Next to Me on the Plane

December 13, 2011 17 Comments

It is almost 10:30 PM here in Kibbutz Farod, due southwest of Tzfat in Israel. I’m back in the motherland. I’ll get to the time leading up to this moment, but I have to get something off my chest before I start. I was somewhat nervous about taking this trip. I felt unprepared and unsure about it. Arriving in Ben-Gurion, hopping on the bus and seeing Israel through the windows, it all melted away. I love Israel. It feels like home. The first step of the journey was the red-eye I took to New York on Saturday. Getting a chance to spend time with Amira and Steve is always a pleasure, and this time was no different, though it was a little difficult arriving and feeling like this. Amira was busy in the morning so I got a chance to hang out with Steve and discuss some philosophical matters over

Thanksgiving / 36 Arguments

November 27, 2011 1 Comment

Visiting my parents in southern California used to give me a strange paranoia. Returning to LA, for whatever reason, made me feel like I was regressing. (That is, of course, ridiculous.) Since college, however, Santa Monica has been a source of some much-needed emotional recharging and re-invigoration of my inspirado. I count myself among the very fortunate for having such an open, loving, supportive, hilarious family. Thanksgiving seems to me to be a necessarily stressful time, what with family, food, drink and close-quarters, but we manage to pull it off year after year. I display a certain level of unease at the whole process, but by the end it’s usually all smiles and sad goodbyes. This time around it was particularly hard leaving my sister–she and I are very close and New York is very far away. Being with my brother, sister-in-law and my nephews is always a pleasure (did you

The Pacific Northwest! Or: Winter is Coming…

November 17, 2011 2 Comments

Those who know me well know of my passion for a certain Max McDaniel, now further augmented by the zest that is Moorea Seal. (The irony, of course, is that Max and Moorea are 2 of the 6-8 of you who might read this.) Max and Moorea live in Seattle, to which I’d never been before May of this year. My first encounter with Seattle was enough to know that I love the city, and my second visit only strengthened that fondness. For some reason I don’t yet understand, I’ve had difficulty expressing exactly why I’m infatuated with Seattle. I can articulate some of it though, I suppose: it has both big-city appeal and smaller-town comfort. I felt comfortable in my own skin in Seattle, as if I were totally in my element. I watched the local folk interact and noticed more and more that their interactions felt honest. I went to

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