About Me

I’ve been lucky to live on the road my entire life: throughout my childhood, I never lived anywhere more than three years, and this pace mostly quickened once I set out on my own. I currently live in Jordan; prior to that I spent nearly four years in Egypt (my longest stay in any one location—I counted), and before that I lived in Uganda, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Mongolia (twice), Taiwan (very briefly), Argentina, and Italy, as well as various places in the United States, Germany, and Puerto Rico. I am natively fluent in Spanish, functional-ish in Italian, and I try to at least maintain whatever Mongolian I still remember.

I am married with two children; together we've also adopted a Ugandan dog and an Egyptian street cat, and might have recently adopted a Jordanian street cat (time will tell if he decides that on-demand treats and petties are worth enduring the other two pets and occasionally getting put in the cat carrier).

A few weeks into kindergarten, I and all the other little muffinheads were asked to write Halloween stories. We were each given a sheet of writing paper, the kind that is a sickly gray color with solid lines and dotted lines; the top half of the paper was empty so we could illustrate our work. I don’t remember what my story was about, but I remember that I was excited, and that I drew the attention of the teacher’s assistant, who was young and pretty and nice. In my mind over the years I’ve conflated her with Anita Pointer of the Pointer Sisters, who had a similar build and complexion, but who did not, as far as I know, assistant teach kindergarten in North Carolina. I don’t remember her actual name—the main teacher was Mrs. Williams, who terrified me something awful on the first day of school but quickly became a loving if strict presence, the sort of matronly southern Black woman who calls children “honey” and adults “child” and doesn’t put up with nothin’ from either but rarely needs to because she commands the room so completely. Or at least that’s how it looked to tiny me, who was always among the smallest in the class and who, at age five, was still learning to balance very heavy glasses on my adorable little nose.

But back to my story, and to the teacher that I’ll call Miss Anita for lack of another name (a ringing in the back of my mind tells me it was maybe Miss Jackie or Miss Jacqueline, but that might be conflated from somewhere else, too; I could ask my mother, who volunteered in the classroom so she could keep tabs on me and also because she was bored and also because it helped her improve her English very quickly, but my mother’s unreliable narration is a recurring theme in my life and the source of boundless mystery and confusion, so I’ll demur on that).

I’m going to assume that I sat next to Jamie when I wrote my story, because I basically always sat next to Jamie in kindergarten. I don’t think we ever planned it, at least I don’t remember ever telling her to sit by me, or having her tell me to. It just happened and then it felt natural, and I am a creature of habit. At nap time we’d lay our towels near each other and talk when Mrs. Williams wasn’t looking, which felt thrillingly naughty until one day Jamie got a terrific nosebleed and I was sure that it was because we’d broken the rules.

So one by one the other kids finished their stories, complete with illustrations. Bats, witches, pumpkins, and there was always that one kid who mashed the crayon down too hard and just went back and forth until the paper ripped and he shouted “It’s a monster!” But I was writing hard. I raised my hand when it looked like my story was going to run on for longer than the allowed five lines. Miss Anita brought me a second paper and told me to continue the story there, that she would join the pages later. Another kid—I want to say it was Celeste, because I had an unprovable feeling, dimly remembered forty-plus years later, that Celeste was kind of competitive with me, and also that her blue eyes were equal parts eerie and pretty, and that she couldn’t be trusted with the jar of paste because she would eat it—had added a line to her paper in order to catch the last two words of her story, so the precedent was well-established.

Anyway, a few minutes passed and about half the kids were allowed to play because they were finished and had received a check or smiley face of approval from Mrs. Williams’ red felt-tip pen (smiley face meant good work, a check mark meant “Well, you did it, so I can’t keep you back, but it isn’t very good, is it?”, and you better believe I was inconsolable for days when I got my first check mark—I remember the assignment clearly and will probably end up talking about it at some point, as it is one of my weirder core memories).

But I was still plugging away at my story, and I asked for a third sheet. Soon it would be recess or math or rug time or something, and my story had no end in sight. I think I was still worldbuilding at that point. Miss Anita intervened. She sat with me and asked me to tell her the story, and she would write it for me. I could illustrate the first page while talking and both tasks could get done at once. So I started talking, and the handwriting on my gray paper changed from my labored block printing to much more fluid adult handwriting: good-girl writing, belonging to a good girl who had grown up and now aspired to be a kindergarten teacher.

In the end, I filled five sheets of paper, more than anyone else had even dreamed possible, and had I had enough time and continued with my own handwriting instead of Miss Anita’s smaller and neater writing, I’m sure it would have been six or seven. My drawing, it was kind of meh at best, but that didn’t matter. I joined my friends for the final bit of playtime that was probably about ninety seconds but was enough time to play three entire games somehow, and Miss Anita stapled all my papers together and then stapled the whole package onto orange construction paper.

At parents’ night a week or so later, all of the stories were hung up in the hallway with tape, and although there were quite a few stories with extra lines attached like Celeste’s, mine was the only one with staples on it. My father found mine on the wall and was impressed that he had to actually flip pages. He congratulated me and said, “This kid’s going to be a writer!”

In a book or movie, this would be the moment where I decided I wanted to be a writer. But in real life it wasn’t. It was just one of a series of data points that gradually accumulated until I realized that I function a lot better on the page than in person. But the story, this slice of my life as a five-year-old tadpole of a person, which is absolutely true except for the parts that I’ve already admitted to making up or guessing about, does hint at a lot of what would become my lifelong interests and obsessions and quirks (like, were there any boys in my kindergarten? There had to have been, but I guess I deleted them all from my memory files)

When I was a teacher, I always preferred to bring my lunch and eat it at my desk. I’m not a workaholic—far, far from it—but when my classroom was empty it was agreeably quiet, and lunch breaks were so short that walking to the teacher’s lounge and then getting sucked into a conversation with some grumpy teacher—it’s the grumpy ones who keep talking even when you don’t engage, because they need to grump and don’t care whether you want to hear it or not—chewed up a lot of time. And I eat fast, so going there, setting up, cleaning up, and coming back took longer than just eating at my desk.

But I was new and I was invited to join the other teachers at the cafeteria. This was at an English-language academy that rented space at Manhattan College in the Bronx, which my boss told me doubled for Princeton in the film “A Beautiful Mind.” (Weirdly, my wedding ring was purchased from a jeweler in Brooklyn who claimed to have supplied the wedding rings featured on the poster of that same film, so that’s two connections I have to “A Beautiful Mind,” a film which I confess I have never actually watched. Alas, I’ve never investigated if either of those claims—about Princeton or the wedding rings—is true.) It would have been impolite to say no, so I joined them and left my delicious sandwich in my bag at my desk and went to spend more than I could afford on some Sodexho institution food (not the same recipes that they use in prisons, I assume).

The staff were all EFL teachers briefly stopping over in New York City for a year or two as part of the international English-teaching racket. It was an unseasonably warm day, I remember, and one person complained that it was too hot. Another teacher immediately chimed in, “Oh, I used to teach in Honduras, it could get so hot there, this is nothing.” Another then jumped in, “I taught in northern Mexico, and let me tell you, even that dry heat in the middle of summer, it’s nasty.” A third teacher didn’t miss a beat: “You think that’s hot? I taught in Bangladesh. It was so hot there.” And a fourth teacher, “Hotter than the Balkans in summer, though? Because let me tell you, nobody talks about it, but Sarajevo in summer is like death.”

That left me to speak up. I had wanted to talk about the summer in Erdenet that was so hot and dry that when I went to the store I felt my skin crinkle, and how basically the whole city stayed indoors until the sun started to go down, and then the shopping center would fill with everyone doing their shopping in that hour before the vendors went home. I thought it was an amusing story, and it might have been had I spoken second. But at this point, I mean, what could I say?

“I was on the surface of the sun…”

I wasn’t invited to lunch again, and I quit a few months later to move to the Gobi Desert.

Music is the foundation of my life but I’m not a musician. When I was in fifth grade I signed up for school band and they gave me a trombone. My father was excited because Willie Colon plays trombone, and he immediately went into a world of fantasies of raising a bandleader. But alas, I was a shrimpy kid, and in the instrument was bigger than I was. My arms couldn’t reliably reach all of the notes. After a few months of no progress coupled with the sharp taste of brass in my mouth, I gave the instrument back.

At sixteen I received an acoustic guitar for Christmas, a Hohner. I’ve had it ever since, and I’ve lugged it all over the world. I have never learned how to play it, but I can’t part ways with it, and I make sure its strings are tuned and playable. I hangs it in my music room, the way a believer might frame a portrait of the pope or the Kaaba. It casts a benign glow over my house, but is essentially unplayed.

I compensate by listening to an extraordinary amount of music, and then trying to apply its lessons to other things that I am better at. Like my writing. It flows to melodies that only I can hear, and if there’s ever a sentence that hops around more than it should, you can assume it followed an instrument there somehow.

Before going to college, I steeled myself for the onslaught of new people I’d meet by prepping a list of answers to common questions. Decades later, the list has not really been updated, since it was never accurate to begin with—it was always as much aspirational and even performative as it was sincere—but it remains as fine a window into my head as any.

FAVORITE BOOK: Please Kill Me

FAVORITE MOVIE: The Apartment

FAVORITE TV SHOW: Oh, I don't really watch TV

FAVORITE SONG: "Summertime", any version

FAVORITE ROCK BAND: The Velvet Underground

FAVORITE FOOD: I wish I could say something sophisticated, but honestly, it’s pizza

FAVORITE PIZZA: A regular slice; bonus points if the guy sprinkles a little fresh cheese on it before heating it back up

FAVORITE TEAM: Eww

FAVORITE SPORT: Poetry?

FAVORITE SUBJECT IN HIGH SCHOOL: History, then maybe theater

FAVORITE ICE CREAM: Before you say it’s boring, remember that vanilla comes from magic beans that only grow in Tahiti and Madagascar