Photo Essay: The High Line, Almost Spring

As soon as the weather got nice like it did this weekend, I went back to The High Line, the convergence of New York City's industrial past and its disappearing wildnerness, where an out-of-commission elevated railway is embraced for its newly feral nature and turned into a city park.











Signs of spring - little bits of green peeking out from bushels of brown - intermingle with the clumps of snow, reminding us: it is still very much winter.

More photos of The High Line available here (at night) and here (at the Magic Hour).

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.

We're Halfway There

Exactly two months after starting my new regime, I've hit the halfway point in my goal towards losing 30 pounds.

Weight has always been a struggle for me, having been cursed with bad genetics from both sides. I was born a big baby, maybe only partially because my mother delivered me three weeks late. For the first couple years of my life, I didn't like to eat anything, and my parents spent all of their time trying to shove food down my throat. For as long as I can remember, though, I had no problem eating pizza, cheese curls, macaroni and cheese, fried fish sticks, peanut butter, bologna, cookies for dessert and birthday cake for breakfast. Although we were only allowed to eat during meals (no snacks - if you were hungry, too bad), as a child I think I was essentially a human garbage can.

It's not that I had that big of an appetite growing up. It's just that I'd get in trouble if I didn't finish the adult-sized portions my mother doled out onto my plate, encouraging second helpings. Never one to fail at a task at hand, I choked down mountains of boiled meats, cabbage and stewed tomatoes in order to get to the buttery mashed potatoes, spaetzel and sticky desserts that made dinnertime - fraught with reports of our misbehavings - somewhat more palatable.

Sure, I grew up in the 70s and 80s, when only hippies cared about organic, natural, and raw foods. But still, I didn't know anyone else who was forced to eat Twinkies for breakfast on Saturday morning.

I'm sure I would have been the envy of all of my friends. Except I always talked about needing to be on a diet.

I don't remember a time when I didn't think I was fat. I was five or six years old when my parents let me and my sister take a dance class, something I was thrilled about. But some physical issues with my sister displaced us into a gymnastics class, a physical activity we both struggled with. In kindergarten, during a brief stint as a cheerleader, one of my nasty female classmates cattily asked me if it was hard to run with my fat stomach in the way. In my fourth grade class picture, I was more bothered by my fat knees, sitting in the front row, than by my clunky plastic glasses or the short, boyish haircut that my mother forced me to wear.

As I got older, I just kept getting bigger. I was by no means obese, but annual visits to the pediatrician always brought lectures about how overweight my sister and I were. Our mother insisted that our plump bodies weren't as a result of fat but rather baby fat, and that we'd grow out of it. But by junior high, when all of our bodies were developing and mine wasn't shaping up as well as my classmates', I found every excuse to get out of swim class.

In fact, into high school, I found every excuse to get out of all physical activity in front of others, which just made me even bigger.

Sometime in my late teens, when I was still living at home, my mother turned on me as she often did, finding one more thing to complain about: "When we eat out at a restaurant, you eat like a truck driver," she lashed out. "But when we're home, you eat like a bird."

She may have been right. After all, I did not love my mother's cooking or the cuisine of my father's heritage. However, it was, by far, the most hurtful thing I'd ever heard my mother say - even worse than all the names, damnations to hell, and accusations of blame that she'd hurled at me and my sister over the years. I gasped, and then walked out of the house.

After a teary call to a friend from a phone booth, it started to rain, and dinnertime approached, so I went back home. Upon my return, I was presently grounded for some ridiculous period of time. I'd gotten accustomed to that kind of punishment by then.

As an adult woman with persistent cravings for pizza and cheese curls and soda and french fries and dip and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, it's easy to say "My mother made me fat." Sure, I lost a lot of weight when I moved out of my parents' house and in with the Ferraras, and when I spent a semester in London with no money for food. But my mother was nowhere to be found when I started gaining weight in New York City, reaching a critical mass in 2003 which  led to my first loss of thirty pounds. And she'd completely disappeared four years later when I started putting it back on.

Even if my mother did contribute to my original plumpness - either through her genetic contribution to me, or through pigout encouragements - in a way, she contributes more to my determination to not be fat now.

My mother has struggled with weight ever since I can remember. When I was in third or fourth grade, she was diagnosed with hypoglycemia, finally something on which she could blame her weight problems and her screaming explosions. She started seeing endocrinologists and nutritionists, and became more obsessed with food than ever. She started eating her meals alone in the kitchen, so increasingly secretively that we weren't allowed to even walk by, for fear that we'd catch a glimpse of her (thereby barring us from visits to the only bathroom in the house, which was accessible only through the kitchen). When the Twinkies went missing, she was the first to defend, "Well, I know I didn't eat them!" None of the rest of the family really knew what she was eating.

But she managed to lose a lot of weight once, by starving herself on a 1000-calorie daily diet, and working out obsessively at Bally's. Not surprisingly, eventually she gained all the weight back, and then some. She found other physical ailments to blame. And as far as I know, she is more stagnant, isolated, and agoraphobic than ever.

So far, I've done a pretty good job not becoming my mother, and it's not just about not weighing 200 pounds. I am social, active, educated, and relatively healthy. I have friends. I am well-respected in my career. And I have not borne children in order to finally be loved, only to raise them in such a way that they cannot help but hate me. My mother's absence of livelihood defines her way more than the size of her body does.

In turn, my joie de vivre defines me way more than do my jeans cutting into the fat around my waist. But losing 15 pounds - or, hopefully, 30 - has lightened my physical load as well as my mental load, and has allowed me to live more.

And who wouldn't want that?

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.

Joie de Vivre

"What do you do in life? En vie, as the French always ask..." Kamel, our tour guide, was probably one of the last people from my Tunisian tour group to ask me what I did for a living.

I raised my eyebrows. I'd told everybody else in our group the bits about marketing music and freelance writing, but I'd never felt like I'd properly answered the question. "What do I do? Je voyage. J'ecris. Je pense. La photographie..." Somehow talking about my travels, my personal writing, my thoughts and my photos seemed to get at the heart of me and my life more than describing what I do as an independent marketing consultant.

Ever since I quit my job over a year ago - which shattered my professional career into three or more different tracks - I've had this problem in parlor conversations. It's especially an issue in New York City - or Western society in general - where asking "What do you do?" clearly means "What do you do for a living?" But, unfortunately in my case, a living is not really living. So, except for when talking to Kamel, I've grown accustomed to answering others' questions with a question: "Do you mean what do I do to make money?"

I think it's possible that a person can make a life out of a job. You can help people every day and love it. Making a difference can make a good life. But for me, at least right now, work simply signifies a means to an end: make enough money to pay the rent, eat, and go on the next trip.

People don't really like to hear that when they're trying to make conversation. They have jobs. They must work. They focus on their careers, craft their elevator pitches, climb ladders, negotiate raises and pay insurance premiums. They miss the bus because their boss kept them late. They don suits and hoist briefcases, laptop bags. They input all the essential information about their life - their calendar, contacts and correspondences - into their Blackberries and iPhones and PDAs, all fragile digital devices that are easily dropped, broken, stolen or lost.

And one day, they don't have a job anymore. They are fired, or laid off, or eliminated, or forced to quit, and they feel as though they have no life left. How can you live when that which you do for a living simply ... disappears?

This is what I've set out to discover. What is life beyond work? What is more important than making my bosses money, collecting only a minor commission off their total wealth? What is my self-concept without the praise or "constructive criticism" of a yearly review, title changes, raises, and bonuses (or worse yet, the absence thereof)? What is the five-year-plan? Do I even need one?

What do I do?

For now, I try to live well.

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.

Photo Essay: West Essex Rail Trail

Now that Edith is enjoying a four-day work week, we decided to make the most of her fifth day this week by exploring one of the many rail trails in New Jersey - old train tracks that have been converted into bike paths and hiking trails, many years into their disuse.

"Sneakers or hiking boots?" I asked. I remembered Edith's story of jumping into three feet of snow off the burning ACES train somewhere in Bucks County, and I thought at least a few inches of that might remain in Montclair, where we were going to pick up the trail.

Edith said she was wearing sneakers and assured me that it would be fine. It would be flat, after all.

I should have worn hiking boots.

The early afternoon sun glowed warm through the trees lining the trail, turning snow into slush and sending each of my feet out to each side of the trail, slipping wet and soft but somehow slogging forward.

the entrance

power lines

deer tracks

tree

marker

vestiges

bridge

bridge

mile stone

Three miles of trudging along snow over gravel over phantom rails and ties, we hit one unexpected hill and  didn't feel cold at all despite wind and wet feet.

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.

Excavating the Ruins

"I've just learned that if you tell me you're going on a trip, there's got to be an abandoned town there somewhere." Maria knows me well.

I've spent most of the last two years exploring lost civilizations, both modern and ancient - following the trails of the fated pioneers lost to Death Valley, lured by gold, and living off the land in the vast wilderness of the very wild west. Whether they succumbed to the elements right there in their own home, or were driven out by floods and avian flu, or just slowly disappeared with little trace of their existence, the ghosts fascinate me.

Most of my poking around has been amidst the relics of modern culture, people who left behind mines and yacht clubs and grand estates, but that's because the United States is a pretty new country. And the original immigrants destroyed pretty much anything "ancient" that the Native American tribesmen would have built before them. Not so in the rest of the world.

One of the things that interested me about Tunisia - besides its predicted similarity to Morocco - was the promise of Roman and Phoenician ruins. Sure, I could have gone to Greece, or Pompeii, but the anachronism of the Roman empire in what we westerners think of as Africa was just too intriguing to pass up.

Carthage

Ground zero of the Roman empire in Tunisia is Carthage, the northernmost town on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, outside of modern Tunis. Carthage was actually originally founded by the Phoenicians (naming it their "New City") and proved to be a battleground through the Third Punic War, eventually destroyed by the Romans. Little evidence exists from that first colony except a few gravestones and urns.

Cato the Elder's battlecry "Delenda est Carthago" ("Carthage must be destroyed") soon transformed into Julius Caesar's declarum, "Carthage must be rebuilt," and so began the evolution of Carthage into not just one city, but a series of cities, to be overtaken later by the Vandals, the Byzantines, and, finally, the Muslims in the 7th century, building modern Tunis partially on top of old Carthage.

Carthage, just across the Mediterranean from Sicily, wasn't the only city built by the Romans and later destroyed. Farther inland, you can find a magnificent ampitheatre in El Djem...

El Djem

...the town of Sbeitla whose excavations have not yet revealed the extent of the former Roman town, many of whose Sufetula ruins lie under private housing and commercial buildings...

Sbeitla

...and the archaelogical site of Dougga, tucked away in what looks like the English countryside, up on a hill, where you can walk onto the theatre stage, across the forum, into temples and baths and private homes and even a brothel.

Dougga

These towns are the casualties of war, in a country that was fought over by feuding empires over the centuries that led up to and began our modern era after the supposed birth of Christ, who happens to dictate our calendar.

Like in America, the native inhabitants of Tunisia - the Berbers - were driven out of their homes by these invading empires, farther inland towards the desert, sometimes into mountainside and underground caves to escape the heat and whatever other threats that lie on the earth's surface. But even the Berbers, who made homes out of brick and mud and whatever materials they could get their hands on, couldn't withstand nature's fury, and the villagers of the mountain oases of Tamerza and Chebika fled when their homes were washed away by floods as recently as the 1960s.

Tamerza

Chebika

Now tourists like myself drink lemonade from the terrace of a fancy hotel in Tamerza and look out over the river bed which is now dry, only 40 years after that disastrous flood.

I can't help but thinking of the building and razing and rebuilding that's happened in my own life - the emotional fortresses I built to protect myself from my enraged and manipulating parents, the smiling front I put on my face to survive teasing and questioning classmates, the flirtation and aggression that emerged so that boyfriends, colleagues, and employers wouldn't catch a glimpse of my former self, hiding in the basement from my mother's fiery wrath, writing poems and dreams in my diary with hopes that someone or something would eventually wash me away.

My existential crisis of the last two years has stripped a lot of those layers away. My artifice was torn down by force in a work situation that proved to be manipulative and retaliative. Lovers betrayed me and abandoned me. Parents ceased to exist. And so I'm starting to become reacquainted with my own original self, the ruins of which are slowly being excavated out of years of overgrowth and, maybe like much of the modern architecture facing the threat of destruction in the U.S., inappropriate repairs and additions.

I remember how much I loved French. How much I loved writing in French. Why did I not spend more time in La Maison in college?

I was a mathematical genius. What happened to that?

I used to have hope. Where has it gone?

I used to believe that someone would love me someday for who I am. I think I've given up on that altogether.

But maybe there's something inside, something deep underground or just below the surface, that can be brought into light. I guess I just have to keep digging...

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.

Conversations de Tunisie: Sidi Bou Said

In every touristic area of Tunisia, whether you're a man or a woman, you get heckled by various men trying to sell you their wares, practice their English with you, or guide you to some landmark in exchange for some dinars for being your tour guide. Some places are worse than others, but generally it's just a nuisance.

Unless you're a single woman walking alone.

By our last day touring Tunisia, I was really sick of men calling out to me, "Helloooo," "Eeengleeesh?"

I was wandering the streets of Sidi Bou Said, a suburb of Tunis, eating a chicken chawarma sandwich on some freshly-baked tabouna bread and taking photos of all the blue doors, with a blue Mediterranean backdrop.

I heard a man calling after me. First in Arabic, then in French. I rolled my eyes. Not again.

His calls became more urgent. "Mademoiselle, mademoiselle!"

I turned around. "QUOI?!" WHAT DO YOU WANT.

Oops, he was a police officer.

I gathered he was telling me that where I was walking was forbidden or private - in any case, interdite - and I was shocked, not having seen any signs.

"Interdite, ici?" I asked.

"Oui," he said, fortunately for me, with a smile.

"Je m'excuse..." I smiled back, and headed back up the cobblestone slope to explore more forbidden pathways undiscovered, while the sun was still shining and I could hear the roar of the sea.

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.

Photo Essay: Sfax Souk

An early morning stroll through the market of old town Sfax, the second largest city in Tunisia:













fresh tabouna

fish market

ready for filleting

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.

Conversations de Tunisie

After our calèche ride through the oasis in Tozeur - during which our driver invited me to sit in the front seat of the carriage and take the reins while he spoke to me in Italian and I somehow understood - one of my tour mates noticed the poinsettia in my hair and asked me about it. I explained to her that it was a parting gift from my calèche driver.

"Oh, you seem to be getting all the Tunisian men on this trip," she said.

"Yes," I smiled, "I'm leaving a trail of broken hearts behind me as I travel across the country."

Our tour director Aileen, an Englishwoman who is partnered with a Tunisian and has been conducting tours for the last ten years, chimed in, "Tunisian men haven't got hearts."

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.

One Hell of a Sandstorm

Since I was the youngest of our tour group in Tunisia, which was thirty people strong consisting of mostly English retirees, I suppose it's not surprising that I was only one of three to opt in to the camel ride excursion on Tuesday afternoon in Douz, all of us solo travelers and therefore somehow braver than the others.

Even though I'd taken a camel ride once before in Morocco, I didn't know how brave I'd have to be for this one.

Setting off on the camel was easier this time than last, perhaps because I didn't have Michelle behind me tipping to one side, and, with arms wrapped around my waist, dragging me down with her. My camel this time was smaller than the last, but lifted herself up on her hind legs and then front with considerably less effort and vocalizations. Being only at the gateway to the Sahara Desert, the terrain ahead looked relatively flat, with a light-colored sand that not only matched the fur of my camel, but also the dress in which I'd been outfitted by our tour guide Kamel. He'd insisted against the standard prison-issue black-and-white striped garb, but rather be dressed "like a princess."



After an uneventful saunter into the Sahara, past dunes not taller than me, we felt just a few raindrops before the wind kicked up and nearly blew that garb off of me.

By the time we reached the turnaround point, about a half hour into our ride, it was clear: we were in one hell of a sandstorm.



I'd experienced one before, at the riad in Morocco, which passed fleetingly but sent chairs, drinks, and t-shirts into the pool and darkened the skies as it passed. This one was more like an oncoming snowstorm, with persistent low visibility, screeching wind, and freezing temperatures that seemed to have dropped instantaneously. And it didn't just pass. It got worse as proceeded, our guide on foot and three of us atop camels, thethered together by turquoise rope strung through pierced noses.

The camels didn't resist the worsening conditions, but rather trudged on dutifully, facing the brunt of the wind without a sound. I squeezed my eyes chosed so tihgtly, keeping any new sand out but trapping all existing sand in, despite the tears running down my face. I'd slipped on my sunglasses despite the darkening hour and the setting sun, but it was no use: sand had insinuated itself into eyes, ears, nose and teeth, settling between the lips and beneath the contact lenses.

I was convinced I'd never be able to open my eyes again.

To be honest, I was disappointed to be missing the storm, as much as I could hear and feel it. I wanted to see how our guide was faring, whether other camels had succumbed to the sand, or whether our tour mates traveling en calèche had been blown over, horses run off.

I managed to get the left eye open a few times, for only a second at a time, but enough to realize we'd turned around and were on our way back. I remembered Aileen, our tour director, telling us to stay on the camel so we could see "what's beyond the dunes," and I wondered whether the sandstorm was a meteorological anomaly that occurred past a certain point, til I realized that the conditions were just as bad now at our starting point, too. (Turns out sandstorms are actually not that commonplace there, so we got quite a treat on our ride.)

Still, exhilaration forced my lips open into a smile from behind my orange headdress, letting more sand into mouth. My eyes were squinted into slits as I dismounted and tried to find the change to tip our guide 2DT, and I ran to take my contacts out at the counter as tears enveloped my face.

I think the others were glad they'd opted out of the camel ride, upon hearing our story, but I was ever so much more glad I'd gone. There's nothing like a little near-blindness to make an everyday camel ride so much more memorable.

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.

Happy on St. Valentine's Day

I don't know how much I'll weigh when I get home, but I almost don't care. I feel good.

Sure, the men of Tunisia are more than appreciative of a juicy derrière and une femme with a healthy form, but when I look in the mirror, I like what I see.

I like it without penance for the brik I had for lunch more than once (a deep-fried phyllo-like pastry with a runny egg, parsley, potato, and tuna inside being irresistible not only because it's local to Tunisie, but because it's freaking delicious).

I like it even though I have spent much of my time here sitting on a coach bus, climbing a few sand dunes when the opportunity presented itself to me, and swimming laps for almost an hour amidst French and Italian tourists and a few leering Muslim men who were perhaps more curious than threatening.

My travels have evolved over the last year, placing increasingly less importance on food and more importance on land, culture, adventure, experience.

The waiter at dinner last night reminded me that it was going to be the fête de St. Valentin today, and encouraged me to start celebrating it last night. But instead of drowning myself in the Magon rouge demi boîte I was drinking, or God forbid ordering an entire bottle of red wine, I happily retired to ma chambre and look a long last look at the twinkling city lights of Tunis.

Today I fly home to New York with a stopover in Paris, the most romantic city in the world. But I'm feeling good about myself, and will enjoy my last day of traveling.

Further Reading:
Disregarding Deadlines

To become a fan on Facebook, click here.