Food rules. Little rivals the pleasure of tearing into a glistening burger.
Mary H.K. Choi
My mom is an excellent mom. She knows I am irascible, prickly, and antisocial. She knows that most human interaction makes me tired and that I either scare people away with precise invectives or trot out the fakest, nicest skinjob of myself because it requires zero effort.
In order to be a good emergency contact, you need a lot of friend-patience and empathy. Often, this comes from personal experience with anxiety, trauma, and depression.
I was born in Korea and left before my first birthday.
I find texting to be kind of a safe space.
Wikipedia's a collaborative experiment akin to Simon Winchester's account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in 'The Professor and the Madman,' which outlines James Murray's mission to produce the tome in the 19th century.
The thing about leaving New York is that you can come back.
'Emergency Contact' is about the anxiousness that is inherent in meat space interactions.
Manhattan, after eight years here, still reminds me of Hong Kong. There are parts of Chinatown that are the spit and image of streets in Wan Chai, and I am held in thrall by the Chrysler building as much as I was by I.M. Pei's Bank of China Tower.
The notion of this 'emergency contact' is, Do you have someone who is holding you down? Do you know where to go if you're feeling bad? I keep likening it to assigning yourself a godparent of your choosing.
I am obsessed with Neil Patrick Harris on Twitter.
Never post anything personal to your Facebook wall. Or anyone else's, for that matter. Only snitches and teachers look at Facebook.
I'm just going to write whatever I'm going to write, and whatever shelf or section they end up on at the bookstore is just going to be that, and I'll let the marketing people pull their hair out and worry about it.
Pirates, me hearties, are the Patronus of the freelancer.
I'm pretty sure I peaked at 15.
'Sorry' is unlike anything Bieber has made in the past. It has been classified as 'tropical house' and 'dancehall,' but everyone seems to agree on one thing: It's a banger.
Twenty-thirteen was the year I got super into SoulCycle.
If you are someone's emergency contact - you are their person, and they are your person - there is work involved.
For my first job interview out of college, I wore a cream-colored cotton suit with cap sleeves and an inverted box pleat skirt that was appropriate for the late-August heat - and wildly discordant with the Red Hook offices of the graffiti magazine I had called twice to find.
When you have tools with which to stalk everyone all the time, the most seemingly aloof person wins.
Aside from the can, everything about LaCroix is gentle.
Pedicures are disgraceful.
When I moved to New York City from Texas at 22, amateur hour was over. As a newly grown-up person, I vowed I would wear dresses and skirts, wool trousers occasionally, and heels always.
I suspect that living 24/7 in workout attire is the clothing version of the messy topknot. We all know that your hair is dirty, or too long, or too frizzy, or your roots have grown out, but we are all going to accept it as fabulous because that's the deal.
If you're holding your iPhone, and it's the newest iteration of it, you're like, 'Oh, famous people have my phone. Captains of industry have my phone.' And that can be an intoxicating experience for someone who is going off to college for the first time.
People bursting into song in unison and then pointing it at me is maybe the worst thing I can think of, never mind that you have to pay good money to go be yelled/danced at.
I am anti-Halloween.
Nothing is more untoward than a grown man tasking another with snapping a pic expressly so he can 'flex the 'fit.' It's tacky -self-aggrandizing - and speaks to an existential neediness typically reserved for failed actresses and phenomenally successful rappers.
Texting is incredibly anxiety-laden, but I know people who will have a full-blown panic attack if you call them. I'm one of those nightmare humans where the little mailbox has an ellipsis on it because I have 1000 unread emails. So texting is the most immediate yet least anxious of all the incredibly anxious ways that we talk to each other.
Learning to ride a bike in a public park means anyone can see you.
I'm a sucker when it comes to under-explored human potential and 'stuff that makes you be better.'
Never hold up your entire group of friends in real life trying to capture a perfect Instagram pose. Nobody cares.
Teens are strange and magical.
Bieber has taste and pull, which is as important to making quality pop as actual talent.
Nothing beats SoulCycle for dumbing all the way out or re-calibrating a mood in less than an hour, which is reassuring, since I typically wake up in a panic that's candy-coated with a low-grade rage.
A fanboy's heart is filled with love, enthusiasm, and insecurity.
I just love the comics industry.
I do not care for musicals. In fact, I hate them.
If you can relate to what another person is going through while giving their experience room to be its own discrete thing, you're probably a crackerjack emergency contact.
By the time you're in your 30s, unless somebody makes the god-awful decision to gift you with a cooking class or salsa lessons, it may have been a while since you learnt something new.
There is so much focus on being self-sufficient, and it makes it very difficult to ask for things. I've been crippled by this notion of high-functioning self-sufficiency. And I see it a lot in younger girls. Asking for help brings people closer in a way that I suspected but didn't actually put into practice.
Reading aloud to other people is wonderful - if you have people who will suffer it.
I would never give up 'The Wire,' 'Breaking Bad,' and 'Game of Thrones.' I'm grateful for all these expensive, excellent, graphically ambitious programs.
You are overwhelmed, overscheduled, and dejected because you keep trying to have it all - or at least most of it. You want a fulfilling job and personal life, and it's not working. The way out? Work more.
My sweet spot as a writer and, especially, as an essayist is sub-1500 words.
Even the coolest jobs get stultifying with repetition, and the only way to break that cycle is to bring another job into the mix.
'Avatar' is staggering. It's seismic. Evolutionarily speaking, it is cladogenesis in a thunderclap.
The first time I drank LaCroix, I half expected it to be filled with self-tanner. Or Axe body spray.
'Awkward' is a ubiquitous teen word to denote socially unsanctioned behavior. It usually implies first- or secondhand embarrassment when you or a friend step outside the rules. Awkward doesn't sound overtly judgmental or negative; it's deliberately vague.
Instagram is not a place for tone or irony.
