Every Douche up in Douche-ville liked holidays a lot. . . . But the Jana, who lived just south of Douche-ville, Did NOT!

Getting to know your apartment building neighbors is a perverse and excruciating city-specific experience that I will look back on with warmth and misplaced nostalgia when I am aged and living in seclusion in the country. So like, three years from now.

My urban neighbors are to my adult life what my best friends’ parents were to my adolescence: familiar looking strangers, about whose lives I know wildly inappropriate and intimate details. [ . . . ] Continue »

In this world of rabid social networking, rampant self-celebrity, and the enduring American institution of Happy Hour, it seems as if the hermit—one that retires from society and lives in solitude OR a spiced molasses cookie, depending on which Merriam-Webster definition you want to use—is a creature verging on extinction.

When did hermitage fall out of fashion? Certainly Ted Kaczynski didn’t help the cause. And in the post-9/11 world, any move toward seclusion is viewed, at best, as suspicious and, at worst, as terrorist. [ . . . ] Continue »