I don’t know how to slaughter a turkey. I have no clue how to kill a sheep. I’ve never heard the choked bleats of a dying lamb, and I can’t even imagine the process of turning a furry or feathered animal into the various shanks, chops, thighs and breasts of the butcher’s sinewy world. I figure it begins with a quick slit of the throat, but I really don’t like to figure such things at all.

My trip along the Aegean Sea was one I knew I had to make before leaving Turkey. I didn’t plan on going shortlyafter American Thanksgiving and during the Muslim holiday of Eid, or Kurban Bayrami in Turkish – literally the Festival of Sacrifice. It simply worked out that way.

 I was teaching at an international school and living in Istanbul at the time, where it was easy enough to duck into a Starbuck or Gloria Jean’s and imagine I was just across the street from home, instead of around the world. Yet in the midsized village of Selçuk, just an hour’s flight from Istanbul to Izmir and then a short drive south, coffee shops were scarce. Sheep dominated the landscape. Not in sight, but in smell.

Everywhere I looked countless hoofed balls of fluff were corralled into makeshift holding areas along the roadsides. A boy no older than my eleventh grade students was chain smoking and half-heartedly watching a small flock grazing in an empty lot. A rickety pickup truck jam-packed with sheep lumbered along the road in a truck in front of us. Their heads bent low, I thought I saw a few of them lift their eyes toward mine and stare longingly like, um, sheep on their way to the slaughter. Everywhere we traveled the stench of impending death followed us. At least that’s how my Tofurkey-friendly brain interpreted the smell of sheep poop.

When God asked Abraham to sacrifice the thing he loved the most — his son — Abraham willingly obliged. The ritual of killing sheep on Kurban Bayrami stems from this ancient story. We all know how a ram intervened just before the moment of ultimate sacrifice. The Abrahams of today are still sacrificing lambs (I guess rams are going the way of the buffalo?) instead of their beloved Isaacs or Ishmaels. For some, the four-day-festival marks the end of the Hajj, or the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca – though most, at least in Turkey, just spend the vacation at home with loved ones. The Turkish government put a ban on killing animals in public places, such as playgrounds and parks, but sacrifice is still highly visible in many parts of Turkey.

 Here’s where it gets tricky. The holiday is determined according to the lunar calendar, so on the solar calendar it tends to fall at some point after Thanksgiving and before Christmas and Hanukkah. I never gave much thought to these American holidays – all three of which I celebrate – until I spent them abroad for two years in a row. Before moving to Istanbul I was basically a “pescatarian,” and before that a vegetarian, despite my father having a conniption when I decided I needed to buy soymilk and tofu instead of eating like a “normal” person. Ever since reading about how Throeau didn’t want his “body to be a graveyard for dead animals” in Walden, I couldn’t not think about eating meat. Yet somehow eating meat seemed integral to living in Turkey (or was it that I just didn’t want to commit the ultimate insult by refusing someone’s cooking?) so I went back on the beef. Though I’d always had issues with piles of turkys in plastic wrap huddling in freezers everywhere, I suddenly missed them – along with overdosing on pumpkin pie scones and hearing Christmas carols on an endless loop. Because of this, I was eager to feel the impact of tradition, even if it wasn’t my own. 

Before vacation, I’d asked my students about Kurban Bayrami, and they rolled their eyes in that “OMG we’re so not that provincial” way they did whenever I asked about Turkish or Muslim traditions. Not everyone feels it their duty to slaughter, and you don’t have to get blood on your hands to reap the benefits of the ritual, they explained. Lots of people donate to a mosque and have a sheep slaughtered on their behalf.

 The holidays weren’t the only time I grew homesick. If I became oddly nostalgic for America and needed to reconnect with my country by surrounding myself with potato skins, hamburgers and gas-guzzling SUVs, I went to the wealthier, more bourgeois areas where many of my students lived where you could actually find decent sushi and Mexican food.

 I can picture myself chewing on a tasteless, overpriced mozzarella sticks, thinking I’d be better off with a cheap simit bought off the street. At Turkish restaurants, I almost always ordered lentil soup or chicken kebabs and ate lots of bread, avoiding anything I considered gross, such as red meat. I lived a sanitized, American life even while abroad. But I didn’t want things to be the same. That’s why doing the same things in Turkey I did in the States felt socially acceptable yet still slightly ilicit, like taking lots of ketchup and sugar packets from McDonalds. It was like I brought my sterile American-ness, right along with canned cranberry sauce and factory-farmed Butterballs, with me wherever I roamed. I wanted something to force me to live differently. Life should be different here, I told myself. But in most ways, it felt utterly, oppressively the same.

 At any rate, during my week in Seljuk, I managed to avoid watching the life eek out of a sheep thing. Still, a few peripheral sightings stick in my mind. On a walk through a quaint neighborhood to the Seven Sleepers, I turned my head to the left and looked through a narrow opening into a courtyard, where a bloodied sheep with its hooves tethered together hung upside down. I instinctively turned my head before I could really be sure I’d seen what I saw. A stream of polluted water turned out to be blood, the color of the eggplants stacked at the produce, stand running toward the sewer. A man tossing plastic bags of what appeared to be trash into the back of a garbage truck was actually throwing bags filled to the brim with bloodied sheep’s wool spilling through the handles, oddly resembling the cotton used for fake Christmas snow. My brain wasn’t trained to register such images, so I kept transforming them into something familiar. I realized that it was not the death of a sheep but the dying that bothered me.

 I was travelling with a colleague from school, and we stayed with my former boss and her husband, who had retired to the quaint town after teaching in Istanbul for seven years. During the day, we drove down highways that curled like concrete tongues toward the wide mouths of blazing sunsets. I basked in the sun at the Temple of Apollo. I walked through the ruins at Ephesus, the Greek subsumed by the Roman. I craned my neck looking high up to where the ancient city extended before an earthquake reportedly wiped out the entire metropolis. What had once been the second largest city in the entire world was mostly reduced to fragments of its former self. As legend has it, the bacchanalia festivals held here often rose to a fever-pitched frenzy that resulted in human sacrifice.

At some point during that trip, I stopped thinking of slaughter or sacrifice as barbaric. We all do the same thing, just minus the blood and guts, by elevating celebrities to unattainable heights and then cutting them down. We still have our Isaacs and Ishmaels, only we call them by names like Britney and Lindsay and Jessica and Kim. We intentionally topple – by character assassination or by waging media jihad – someone far removed from us so that those who we care about the most will be protected and safe, at least in theory. So I find it odd that my generation has more education, more experience abroad, and more to give than any generation before us, yet we don’t want to give anything up. In fact, we expect everything without ever considering that if we were ever to be at someone else’s mercy, there’s no ram that would intervene on our behalf.

So that’s why I worry about being more concerned with having a story to tell than actually wanting to live it in the first place.

 The day after the day of sacrifice, there were still plenty of sheep roaming free. I sort of felt like hugging them. Another year written in the book of life, kids! My vacation ended, and I returned to Istanbul to finish out the semester, where I continued to go to Starbucks, and even TGI Fridays on occasion. Though I didn’t know what was next, I knew there would be more pilgrimages to places unknown, if only so that I could be thankful for having returned. 

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Do you consider yourself an Ikea Swedish meatballs or Ikea cinnamon buns kind of person? This is the question I pondered during a much-anticipated pilgrimage to the home furnishings behemoth in Red Hook for the second installment of a weekend game I sometimes like to play called Decorating My Apartment Makes Me Feel Like A Real Adult.  After 3 months of living in our new place and an initial splurge on key household items like knives and chairs, my roommate and I decided it was time to get non-essentials like cookie sheets and mason jars to keep legumes, spices and other organic substances fresh. (I’m neither into Swedish meatballs or cinnamon buns, but I am the kind of person who wants to partake in the gingerbread house building contest in the kid’s play area).

I really try to avoid Ikea, so I beat myself up the entire time I was there. My internal monologue went something like this: “How predictable. How generic and lacking in inspiration or creativity. Didn’t I want my apartment – my space – to be cobbled together with various tchotchkes that reflect the complex kaleidoscope that is my soul? What about all the crap I’d accumulated during my travels, and was I not dedicated to shopping at small, locally owned businesses? Well, my gorgeous ceramic bowls from Turkey broke in transit, and all the nostalgic objects that I once felt defined me quickly turned to meaningless clutter when I had to haphazardly clear them out of my father’s home. As for trying to buy locally, perhaps the wood in Park Slope coffee tables is actually made of Swarovski crystals and valrhona chocolate. The local cheap stuff turned out not to be very cheap.

Soon this monologue died down as I walked in a trance-like state though the furniture jungle. You know what? Ikea products are just so pretty!  Plus, after moving countless times, I really felt like I want to settle (and by that I mean stay in one place for at least a year). Like it or not, part of committing to a  place is buying stuff for said place, stuff that isn’t totally disposable that you can’t wait to sell on Craigslist for a fraction of the price.

But back to the story. So a scowling woman walks into Ikea, and suddenly she is woozy with the overwhelming  urge for turquoise mixing bowls and new bath towels and a pink heart-shaped rug in the children’s section that has no place in her grown-woman apartment and a snuggly throw for watching movies on the couch and those round pastel lampshades that look like Chinese lanterns and the most adorable little snowflake cupcake holders  for the cupcakes she never actually bakes and and while she’s at it she might as well get the matching snowflake apron and potholder, right?  Oh yeah, and then there’s the coffee table she came for.

Here’s the thing: it takes a lot of disposable income to curate a unique style all ones own.  In the meantime, somewhere between totally broke and spending my disposable income on having Nate Berkus pimp my crib, there’s Ikea. Or maybe I can still get away with defining my originality by tearing pages out of magazines and putting them up on my wall in some kind of collage-y pastiche sort of thing….? Um, I didn’t think so either.

So now there’s this funky lamp and coffee table in my living room, plus the turquoise mixing bowls et al populating my kitchen. Maybe I’m just another sterile yuppie lacking in authenticity and a fully-defined self-concept. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Can’t I buy a 3-drawer dresser so my socks and t-shirts don’t have to live like orphans on the bottom of my closet floor without having it instigate an existential crisis?

One more thing. You know how some people say they start sleeping on one side of the bed or parking on one side of the garage to literally make space for someone new? It’s the whole if “you build it they will come theory.” I sort of feel that way about preparing my apartment not for another person, but for my own life.

Please don’t hate me.

I know we’ve all got our pleather thongs bunched up over the Kardashian kerfuffle. Real or fake, for money or for love,  it’s Kim K..’s life – and she’s now alone. For reals. So why is America taking it so personally?

Aren’t we, like, totally over marriage? Considering that many successful, independent women have resigned to, shall we say, less than stellar husband choices (exhibit A: Kris Humphries) should we even be surprised?  I’m not really sure about the rest of the country, but I can tell you why I care. If you have an overbearing mother, a sister with whom you fight constantly but still consider your best friend, or are a petite white girl who doesn’t look like she belongs on The Hills and has butt and not a pancake for an ass, you might, on some level, be able to relate to the Kardashians (Surprise! I have all three).

Kardashian is oft maligned for being a superficial famewhore who epitomizes the self-absorbed, insular lifestyle of America’s wealthy (See the 1%). So when she makes a move that is decidedly not for the cameras, she’s criticized for being all too real. It’s not just Kim, but the rest of us that want the fairytale to continue.

I know, I know.  There was money and lots of attention involved. But beneath the pancake makeup there is a real person there somewhere – complete with her own reality. We’ve done to Kim what we always do to our most cherished celebrities. We put them on pedestals and build them up to unattainable heights, pinning our hopes and dreams on fictionalized reality in the hope that our narratives will somehow veer closer to theirs. When Kim dumped her oaf of a husband after a mere 72-days, it’s not only that we feel betrayed. It’s that we start to fear whatever the fairytale version of our own life is may not come to fruition (and we all have them). Finding “the one” seems even more difficult, because if one of the world’s most beautiful and sought after women can’t make it happen, then how the hell could little old we? (I mean, me).

We raise our noses to the lowbrow action of reality television because it allows us to feel superior about our own lives. Oh! Let me just leave these juiceheads and pregnant teens in the idiot box and go back to my Didion and Harukami novels! I’ll simply return to my own organic, fair-trade, ethically unambiguous world. I mean, it’s not like I ever think about owning lots and lots of shoes (guilty). And  I never consider how I’m going to strengthen my online brand by perfecting the font and color of my name on my Web site (guilty). I’ve never, ever, been blinded to the fact a relationship was going nowhere, either (SO guilty). I mean, it’s not like I have a sex tape lying around (okay, NOT guilty). While I may not have a closet full of Louboutins, I’m not sure that makes me any less superficial. Yes, reality shows depict our hopes and dreams (and fears and failures) and push them to the extreme. We aren’t them, and yet we are.

The obsession with Kardashian’s marriage – not to mention with the British royal nuptials, Bridalplasty, and every other tying-the-knot reality show out there – says more about a cultural fascination with lavish weddings and society’s own love/hate relationship with courtship and marriage than it does about Kim Kardashian. The truth is that we want – and perhaps need – to believe in the made-for-television fairytale now more than ever. And while the speculation about her intentions is understandable, I have a hard time believing that Kim, at 31, wants something all that different from what I  want – and maybe you want too: a successful career, a little bambino or two or three, and maybe, just maybe, not to be alone. And these.

When I lost my iPhone in the back of a taxi a few weeks ago, I decided I wouldn’t replace it. My incessant checking of Gmail, Facebook and Twitter had bred a certain gadget co-dependency that I felt rather ashamed of. I had become that girl walking down the street while texting without looking where she was going. I’m also the girl who has to check her phone in the middle of meals, meetings, and otherwise important events. Rude? Maybe. But you’re probably that girl or guy, too. Still. Perhaps the iPhone mishap was a blessing in disguise. I replaced it with a $20 go-phone, which is the modern-day tin-can-on-a-string equivalent: it makes calls and texts. That’s it. No photos, no email, no Internet – and worst of all, no Tweets. I’d survive. Maybe.

Day one. I could feel myself twitching. Gmail is blocked at my work, so by midday I couldn’t take it. I almost wanted to run into Rite-Aid and get the Patch. But this had nothing to do with nicotine. Finally, I ask to borrow a co-worker’s iPhone to check my email. I had important freelance-writer type emails to keep up with, I rationalized. But I knew there was more to it than that. The emails could wait a few hours. But I couldn’t. After some thought, I realized my Smartphone addiction had nothing to do with any one email, person or app. It had everything to do with a real time current of information that I desperately needed to feel was carrying me along. It wasn’t the information I needed so much as the sense of security I derived from knowing the world was at my fingertips – and not slipping through them. So when I got an email about Connected, a documentary about how our hyper-connected world is changing the way we live and think, I knew I had to see it.

But the film wasn’t at all what I expected. The narrative was propelled by Shlain’s story, but it wasn’t one about connectedness exclusively in the technological sense. It was the story of a tumultuous year, and how her father’s cancer diagnosis changed the trajectory of her story. Shlain lost her father to cancer in the spring of 2009, as did I, and this fact altered my experience of the film.

I really wanted to hone in on the anthropology of it all. The film touched on how societies throughout the world became more patriarchal as soon as literacy was introduced. Shlain’s grief and love for her father was palpable in the way that only a work of art that tries to wrap itself around life and death can be. What Connected does is what all effective stories must do: negotiate something universal behind the particular thrust of the narrative.

So I didn’t get all my answers. I didn’t figure out what to do about my Smartphone addiction, or if I should stop tweeting ridiculous nothings. Nor did I feel much better about feeling more isolated the more connected I become. Perhaps it serves as a facile justification for believing that my device is merely an extension of myself, but Connected helped to put things in perspective. The desire to be connected is fueled by something much more primal than owning a sexy new phone or serotonin-inducing status updates. It’s bound up with our need to create patterns and seek consistency to make sense of the world, especially when reason and logic reach their limits, and most particularly after a loss.

Adrian is (was?) a member.

I recognize that most of my existential questions will go unresolved, but I had to find an answer to my latest (ridiculous and first world) crisis: Should I join the The Park Slope Food Coop?

The concept of the co-op is simple: it’s run and owned by members, so there’s no big boss man disconnected from the workers, and no disgruntled peons on the bottom of the totem pole. Everyone is equal, in theory, which makes for an heirloom tomatoes and flaxseed oil sort of utopia. Again, in theory. Members work one short shift a month (lifting boxes, cutting cheese, weighing dried mango slices, whatever ) and in return have privileged access to luscious organic produce and  natural products at discounted prices.

Yes, I like my kale. But I also like saving money, and I’ve always been a little obsessive about my food in the first place. I’d head the rumors that the PSFC – with 15,000 members, it’s the largest food coop in America — was sort of like a yuppified fascist regime, only with lots of dried mango, yogurt smoothies and frozen vegan enchiladas. Still, I was curious. When I moved to the neighborhood, I stepped inside and asked to look around. I was envisioning a cartoon vegetable-scape like the ones in those  Jolly Green Giant commercials. The guy at the front checking cards informed me that I couldn’t come in without being escorted by a bona fide member, or I’d simply have to sign up myself.  So coop Gestapo did exist!

But I wasn’t put off. If anything, the forbidden fruit thing (no pun intended) made me want to join even more.  After nearly two months, I finally secured a slot at a two-hour long orientation session. The program included a slideshow presentation, introductions from potential members about why they wanted to join, plus apple cider and organic fig bars. For free! I even got my very own official-looking handbooks. After the lecture part of the program, we were instructed to venture downstairs into the basement.

It was at this point that I got separated from my group. As I wandered the aisles, I wondered: am I doing the right thing? Why do I really want to join? Was this merely a narcissistic, bourgeois, agrarian fantasy sort of thing? Did I find some pleasure in the delusion that I was at one with all-powerful Gaia, dear mother earth, because I can purchase Goddess Dressing at a discount? Was it just a temporary anecdote to the fast food banality of modern life, or a way to glamorize the “authenticity” of blue collar work, the kind that real people do for a living for minimum wage? (“Hey! I know how to work a conveyor belt and drive a Zamboni! I feel special!”) What did I think I could find at the coop? Friends? Community? A sense of Belonging or Purpose? What else was there, really, besides tofutti cuties and organic kale and lots of sinewy, scruffy guys who looked like they could just as easily be heroin addicts as they could be health nuts? (And in a place like Park Slope, couldn’t I find all three at any old grocery store?) Perhaps I needed therapy, not a coop membership.

But back to orientation. Finally, I made my way to the basement, where a group in bandanas was cutting brie (perhaps it was stilton or gouda?) on a large chopping table.

“Hello. Would you like some cheese?” asked a bearded gentleman.

“No. I’m looking for my tour group. This is my first time here. I’m worried they won’t let me join because I have a roommate, so we’re technically a household, and they said no sharing and – ”

“Is your roommate a member of the communist party?”

I could deal with the place. I found my group. I joined. My first shopping trip was overwhelming but productive. I had a really good mango from the coop for lunch. I bought gelato s’mores ice cream sandwiches for at least a dollar less than they sell them at Associated Foods.

So far, I haven’t encountered any signs of Fascism, and I haven’t broken the rules by sharing. Well, almost. For now, I’m on the kale train, but ask me again after I work my first shift.

Want to come over and watch MSNBC?

I don’t get bunny ears. Are they sexy because they seem docile and coquettish, just like the furry creatures that procreate a lot? Or have they simply become associated with sex after years of Playboy-inspired scantily clad bunny Halloween costumes?

It turns out a lot of people are skeptical about bunny ears. NBC’s sitcom The Playboy Club premiered last week to a swift backlash against the show’s regressive portrayal of women. At The Washington Post, network television’s fall lineup of shows depicting grown women as kewpie-dolls in kitschy uniforms had critic Hank Stuever asking a simple yet provocative enough to warrant all caps question: WHAT THE [EXPLETIVE] HAPPENED TO WOMEN?

“It’s all bunnies, baby dolls and broads — and bridezillas and bimbos, if you get into reality TV,” writes Stuever. “It’s still giggles and jiggles.”

But perhaps the show isn’t regressive but empowering, suggested Playboy Club star Amber Heard when asked about the show’s potential for glamorizing an era when “boys will be boys” was justification for institutionalized sexual harassment. Women did what women had to do, even if that meant becoming a bunny:

I think there is a common, puritanical way that we look at things where, if it involves sexuality, somehow the women must be compromised. It’s just chauvinistic to deny women their sexuality. It’s about empowering. It comes down to choices. If the choices are available and they’re making that choice, they’re not being exploited.

But many are looking at the whole ‘fluffy bunny tail as a re-branding strategy for the empowered women thing’ with a jaundiced eye. Yet the “if you’ve got it, flaunt it” school of thought seems have struck a nerve.

In a controversial new book, Catherine Hakim, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, suggests that women should consider feminine wiles useful weapons in their personal arsenal of marketable skills, right up there with intelligence and assertiveness. Erotic Capitol: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom, explores why sex appeal is just one trait that can and should be used to get ahead. Hakim highlight social grace, liveliness, and sexual competence as potent forms of cultural currency that women and men can use to achieve success (but especially women):

As I see it, patriarchal men, but also to a larger extent, radical feminist women, which women seem to listen to more than men, say that beauty is only skin deep, it’s trivial, it’s superficial, it has no value, and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to exploit it. And the whole purpose of my book is to say, for men and for women, there is absolutely no reason to feel ashamed of exploiting it and no reason at all for you to be embarrassed at saying this has value.

So where can we draw the line between exploitation and empowerment? Let’s not forget those real-life bunnies, Kendra Wilkinson and Holly Madison, whose roles as Hugh Hefner’s arm candies in The Girls Next Door landed them their own reality shows based on their personal struggles, opinions and lives. And in another realm of the media universe, the superstars of the conservative movement – Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann – haven’t been shy about capitalizing on their attractiveness in their political campaigns (and nor has the media). Finally, when feminist icon Gloria Steinem donned bunny ears and a cottontail in order to expose low wages and poor working conditions at the Playboy club years ago, her subversive move spawned the 1963 article I Was a Playboy Bunny and launched her career as legendary thinker, writer and activist. And if Catherine Hakim had anything to say about it, all of these women, in one way or the other, did the right thing by using their erotic capitol to get ahead.

So at the end of the day, one can’t help but wonder two things: 1) Which of these women are empowered and 2) Would those bunnies ever be taken seriously in the boardroom?

Perhaps we need to look further back. A woman who is smart, savvy and sexy hasn’t always been considered empowered- she’s long been considered a threat. From the beautiful Helen of Troy to the seductive Delilah (held up as an example of the way an attractive women can cause the downfall of powerful men) women who possess beauty and brains have always been a wee bit difficult to pin down.  A t.v. show isn’t just a show, it’s a reflection of the economic and social insecurities of this particular historical moment.

So perhaps this is the real reason a fluffy bunny tail is needed to mitigate feminine power, and why kick-ass vampire slayers have names like Buffy: It’s okay for a woman to use her sexuality for empowerment when navigating a man’s world, as long as women allow the real power of to remain in the hands of men – just like the “good old days.”

Curly-haired Greek

After a lifelong love/hate relationship with my frizzy waves, I got a keratin straightening treatment for the first time about six months ago (thank you Groupon). I walked into the salon with my hair resembling a tangled rat’s nest and came out feeling like a sleek mermaid goddess. The stylists all told me my hair looked ah-ma-zing, which further reinforced how awful I must have looked before. The only problem? I didn’t feel like myself. I felt like I was masquerading in someone else’s hair.

But wasn’t this the moment I’d been waiting for? I remember being told as a teen that I’d look less “ethnic” if I straightened my hair and put some highlights in. First off, I wasn’t quite sure how to take this. I’m not any one ethnicity, and I consider American to be my definitive trait. For some reason it felt like an assault on my character, like I was being told I was lazy or lacking in fashion sense. Yes, curly is sexy, glamorous and somehow voluptuous, but it’s also associated with being unkempt.You have control over your appearance, and by opting not to exercise any of the flat-irons or blowdryers at your disposal, you’re opting out of looking your best. This is how I interpreted this comment at the time.

Oh, I’d had many failed attempts at straightening -  it requires time, patience, and good styling products, none of which I had as a teen.

About a month ago, my treatment had already worn off when I got a new  job.

Curly-haired Jews

I thought about getting another blowout, but for some reason I hesitated. Instead, I decided for the first time in my life to invest in my curls. (The difference between curly and straight hair is that no matter how natural those ringlets or waves may be, they still require intense preparation to go from fro to fabulous.)

I bought outrageously priced hair products instead, and no matter how much I felt like throwing my hair up in a ponytail I forced myself to carefully apply said product and diffuse my curls. My first day at work, I  discovered that the World Financial Center is filled with sleek, well-dressed, straight-haired women. I have two competing reactions when I find myself surrounded by perfectly coiffed women: one is to stand out like the hippie bohemian that I am by rocking crazy hair and bright colors. The other is to make a beeline for J-Crew, buy myself some sensible cardigans and Tory Birch flats, and let my curls melt away beneath the magical powers of a Brazilian Blowout.

But no matter how many pencil skirts I buy, I’ll never feel I’m “one of them” – and it has way more to do with who I am that what my hair looks like. For now, I’m embracing my curls (with a few ponytail and straight days mixed in). But the stigma is still real, and I inevitably feel pressure to go sleek for special occasions. So thanks, Judith Newman, for bringing curly hair out of the closet.

Is it that one story started with a chilling climax, while the other had built toward a slow, cataclysmic end? Is it that we mourn those those we identify with more than others? Those who, in a parallel universe, we could see ourselves becoming?

Many people responded to Amy’s death  with a curt “it comes as no surprise” response. No, I certainly wasn’t shocked, but I was nonetheless saddened, and this dismissive attitude bothered me. It was like we were internally shrugging our shoulders as if to say,” See, I told you so. Look what happens when you succumb to temptation and fail to clean up your act. She got what was coming.”

Lets face it: we glamorize the life of a runaway train. Her legacy is sealed, her potential unfulfilled. There will be no middle years during which she’ll fade into obscurity, no thwarted comeback, no tabloid photos of her getting fat, old or just totally irrelevant – sadly enough, a fate worse than being photographed while shooting up or stumbling onstage.

We often link talent to tortured souls, and while I really hate to make such generalizations,  as someone who often mourns my own untraveled path as a true artist, I recognize the reasons why. Unfortunately, it’s often the same ambition and passion that manifests as stubborn determination to have what one wants when they want. It’s deeply painful to access the parts of ourselves that allow an individual to create, to draw from some inner reservior of pain and derive their art from there.

Though she may be at rest, she now resides in the public imagination, permanently etched as one who was able to conquer and control her voice, but never herself. No matter how troubled, there’s always a certainly clarity of purpose from those  who can’t help but being unapologetically themselves.

I like trains, but I honestly never envisioned I’d voluntarily commit myself to over eight hours in a coach seat – three times over. But after traveling throughout Europe, my sister and I decided it was time to see parts of the U.S. we’d never visited. Going abroad made me want to know about my own country more than ever before.

So here were my rules: pack light, travel cheap, and don’t start WWIII with my sister. Though I try to pack as tightly as possible, I always end up dragging along a plastic bag wherever I go. Yes, I schelp a plastic Target bag like it’s a Louis Vuitton original wherever I go. At the last minute I decided I needed another book, just one more pair of sandals, additional hair clips and oh yeah, a water bottle. Apparently a suitcase, a purse, computer bag and camera bag isn’t enough. A plastic bag is a travel necessity.

Before I’d even left New York, the schelp factor was off the charts.