My year of living un-dangerously...Tokyo, here I come!

Some world traveler I've turned out to be.

It just dawned on me that I've spent nearly a year doing something I haven't done since 1993: I've stayed put. Right before Japan Airlines flight 772 from Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport to Tokyo's Narita Airport departs at 8.15 Thursday morning, I will have spent almost exactly 10 consecutive months in the same country without a single international departure.

That's something I haven't done since 1993 when I flew to Bermuda with a group of my People magazine colleagues on a posh private plane with a full bar (and a bartender who made a killer Bloody Mary!). It was the first time I'd ever traveled outside of the United States, and it launched an adult life spent regularly jetting off into the far-off unknown.

When I returned to New York after several days, I promised myself I'd never again spend an entire calendar year in one country. I vowed to visit at least one new country every year, and it's a promise I've managed to keep. In fact, by the time Japan Airlines flight 771 returns from Tokyo to Sydney on August 30, I will have crossed another city/country off my travel bucket list for the third consecutive calendar year, having already done Tel Aviv, Cape Town and Tanzania.

The last nine years, in particular, have been filled with frequent travel, partly because my travel bug wouldn't have it any other way, and partly because visa requirements limited the amount of time I could stay in any given expat stomping ground without at least one international departure.

With my arrival in Sydney last October 22, I knew everything was about to change. For one, I'd be working a full-time 9-to-5 gig for the first time since 2006. Second, the company that hired me also sponsored me, which meant no more taking flight from my expat stomping ground every 90 days unless I wanted to.

I never expected to last 10 months. There have been four trips to Melbourne, one to Adelaide and one to the Blue Mountains, but I haven't once stepped foot outside of Australia since arriving here from South Africa. I wonder if that has something to do with how underwhelmed I've been with Sydney and, by extension, Australia, despite the fact that I spent years being obsessed with all things Aussie before officially living here.

Maybe it's like moving into your boyfriend's studio apartment and never seeing other people. How could you not get sick of each other when you never get away from each other? How could I fully appreciate Sydney when I'd never given myself the opportunity to miss it?

Everyone tells me to give it time...Sydney is a city that rewards patience. I've tried to be patient, and in some ways, it's paid off. I've settled into my job to the point that I actually enjoy both the gig and my colleagues. And one month ago, I moved into a dream apartment in the building I've wanted to live in since a couple of months after my arrival. Life is good, but Sydney isn't home. Maybe it never will be.

I haven't given up hope, though. I may never find my Sydney "family" or a make a new friend whom I don't work with or go on a fourth date here, but I'm excited to see where my trip to Japan takes me mentally. The best holidays are the ones you don't want to end that also somehow make you appreciate where you live more.

If I've already maxed out my appreciation for Sydney, I'm prepared to live with that. Now that the world traveler is on the verge of making a comeback, I know this arranged marriage can be saved. Just because I don't have to leave every three months doesn't mean I can't. Goodbye, Sydney. Hello, world. Boy have I missed you!

Reflections on Throwback/Coming-Out Thursday with Ty Herndon and Billy Gilman

It's been such a gay week. In some ways, it feels like my career suddenly came full circle, and it had everything to do with Thursday's coming-out announcements of two retro country stars, Ty Herndon and Billy Gilman.

I'll get to why in a moment, but first, let me just say, what perfect timing! A day or two before Ty and Billy both came out, I turned in my latest Huffington Post essay. Title: "Why I Hope One Direction's Harry Styles Is Really Straight."

Also, there's the gay-country-singer-with-a-bratty-but-(surprisingly) talented- wife storyline on the ABC nighttime soap Nashville. It's currently my favorite arc on the show, and it's the most timely one, too, with the reality-TV angle and all. Too bad it's spent most of each episode on the backburner this season.

It's such a perfect cautionary tale about the dangers of being gay in country music. It hurts my soul that the first music l genre I ever loved, one that has been a part of my life for as long as I've been able to mangle a tune, doesn't have much use for me or my kind.

The reason why Ty's and Billy's coming outs make me feel as if my career has come full circle, though, has nothing to do with a fictional prime-time character or homophobia in country music. It has everything to do with how both Ty and Billy factored into my career at key stages in it.

One of the most memorable stories I worked on during my early years as a staff reporter at People magazine was the one we did on Ty Herndon's arrest for allegedly soliciting sex from a male undercover cop. At the time, I remember wishing that the implications of the story might be true. I so wanted Ty to just come out already.

It had nothing to do with political or social concerns. I was in my early 20s at the time, and when it came to sexuality, I didn't really think much about the world outside my bedroom. Not yet. I wanted Ty to be gay because I secretly fantasized about going to Nashville to interview him, falling in love and living happily ever after with one of the hunkiest guys on the country charts. It seems pretty silly now that I look back on it, but I've always had a weakness for that slow southern style, and it's not like country music was overflowing with eye-candy bachelors who were eligible for me.

While I firmly believe we all should have complete control over when we come out, and yes, better late than never, I'm going to hold my applause for Ty -- or keep it muted. It's disappointing that he had to wait until age 52 to publicly declare himself "an out, proud and happy gay man."

It's a shame that he had to go through two marriages to women. It's too bad he had to spend as much time as he did living behind a curtain, though from what I've read, he's been pretty much out in his private life for a while. He says he realized that he had an important story to share five years ago, so why did it take him five years to share it?

I'd be more likely to extol his courage if he were still in his commercial heyday and therefore was risking a hot career by publicly coming out. As it is, Ty's chart peak is nearly two decades behind him. So when he made his announcement, ironically enough, in People magazine, my old alma mater (like I said, full circle), I was more impressed by how great he looks than by his belated coming out. Sadly, I still don't have a shot with him. He's taken.

I never had any designs on Billy Gilman. After all, I met him when I was an editor at Teen People, and he was only 12. I'll never forget the time he visited the Teen People offices with his publicist and mom. He was such a sweet, chatty tween. Before he treated my colleagues and me to a live performance of his then-hit "One Voice," he spent some time hanging out with the entertainment department.

Two things about Billy stand out in my mind to this day. First of all, he was obsessed with the movie Arthur, which I found pretty odd for a 12 year old. Dudley Moore was never a tween sensation, and the movie was released nearly a decade before Billy was born. I was surprised he didn't belt out the chorus from "Arthur's Theme" right then and there.

The second thing that stood out was how he took an immediate and particular liking to me. At the end of the visit, he even invited me to a Broadway performance of Reba McEntire in Annie Get Your Gun that he was going to that evening. I politely declined because as nice a kid as he was, I wasn't really interested in socializing with a 12 year old. When he left, my colleagues joked that the little boy had asked me out.

I think we were all pretty sure Billy would turn out to be gay. I'm not saying that Billy knew he was gay back then, or suggesting that he secretly wanted me. What I am saying is that he must have known a kindred spirit when he saw one.

Although Billy credited Ty Herndon with giving him the courage to come out, I love that he did it a quarter of a century earlier, so to speak. I also love that like a true post-millennial, he didn't release a public statement through his publicist but rather came out via a YouTube video. I also love that he referred to his boyfriend of five months as his "partner."

I know. That's so 26. But it confirms something else I suspected when he was 12. I always had a feeling he'd grow up to be a great guy and an unjaded romantic. Welcome to the party, Billy.

Androgyny Rocks!: Boys Who Sing Like Girls

Adam Levine exudes a certain oily charm (which some might call douchery), but I love at least two things about him that don't involve abs, tattoos or smoldering good looks. First, the Maroon 5 frontman and People magazine's reigning Sexiest Man Alive is not ashamed to wave the rainbow flag and appear on the cover of a gay magazine (Out's September 2011 issue). Second, he's in touch not only with his feminine side but his feminine voice as well.

This past weekend, I watched an episode of The Voice from the current Usher/Shakira season (now airing on South African TV) in which Levine, who's like the demanding Harry Connick Jr. of the panel, attempted to comfort a young male tenor who hadn't gotten any of the coaches/judges to turn around. He said some people say he sings like a girl, too.

In Levine's case, all the way to the bank. Which also has happened to be case for some other male pop and rock acts who weren't ashamed to take it higher when it came to singing their heart out and wearing it on their sleeve... just like a woman.

Foster The People "Coming of Age" I'm still deciding what I think of Supermodel, Foster the People's just-released sophomore album (it improves drastically with repeat listens), but I'll give the attractive boy-band trio this: Despite the album's himbo-friendly title and a few scattered husky vocal turns (on "Goats in Trees" and "The Truth," to name two), frontman Mark Foster's upper vocal register remains his and the band's most-defining characteristic/asset.

White Town "Your Woman" Although the one-man British band didn't exactly sound like a woman, he (as in Jyoti Mishra, aka White Town) adopted a distinctly distaff point of view on this 1997 international smash (No. 1 in the UK and Top 40 in the U.S.) from the album Women in Technology. Then again, it could have been the story of a gay guy breaking up with a bisexual man who was about to swing back the other way. Either way, it was unconventional gender-unspecific pop at its most unforgettable.

Byron Stingily "Get Up (Everybody)" For me, '90s dance music was a woman's world (turned by male DJ's and producers), with the exception of the occasional George Michael reconstruction (namely the Forthright Club Mix of "Spinning the Wheel") and Byron Stingily, the former Ten City vocalist whose three late-'90s No. 1 dance hits included two with connections to Sylvester (see below): "Get Up (Everybody)," which sampled "Dance (Disco Heat)" and a remake of "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)."

Sylvester "Someone Like You" I was too young during Sylvester's disco heyday to fully appreciate late-'70s hits like "Dance (Disco Heat)" and "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)," or the strange placement of the latter's parentheses, and pre-video, it never dawned on me to consider that a guy might be singing them. So the first time I actually saw Sylvester perform (via the video for his 1986 single "Someone Like You," released two years before he died from AIDS complications), his androgynous look was just as stunning as his full-on diva vocals.

Bronski Beat & Marc Almond "I Feel Love (Medley)" No, that was no lady (or Donna Summer) singing Summer's 1975 and 1977 disco classics ("Love to Love You Baby" and "I Feel Love," respectively) with Soft Cell frontman Marc Almond on the 1985 No. 3 UK single. It was Jimmy Sommerville, owner of a lonely heart (in song) and arguably the greatest falsetto to come out of the UK in the '80s. He was also the then-lead singer of Bronski Beat and the soon-to-be frontman of The Communards who, like Byron Stingily, once scored a solo hit (No. 5 in the UK in 1990) with a cover of Sylvester's twice-aforementioned "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)."

Crosby, Stills and Nash "Wasted on the Way" I'd never heard of CSN when I first heard the supergroup trio's 1982 Top 10 comeback single, and my first thought was Wow, this new girl group's harmonies are as tight as Bananarama's! "Southern Cross," the Top 20 follow-up, might as well have arrived via another band from another planet, like Mars.

Supertramp "The Logical Song" Is there a '70s classic-rock frontman more underrated than Supertramp's co-lead singer/main songwriter Roger Hodgson, whose stratospheric pitch on "Give a Little Bit," "The Logical Song," "Take the Long Way Home," "It's Raining Again" and others provided such a thrilling vocal counterpoint to Rich Davies' more conventionally masculine delivery as lead vocalist on "Goodbye Stranger" and "My Kind of Lady," among others? How ever did he manage to make it through an entire Supertramp set without passing out?



Prince "I Wanna Be Your Lover" You have to hand it to Prince. I can't think of another superstar who could sing in falsetto, wear suspenders with short shorts, and style his hair in a Farrah Fawcett flip, and still make all the girls go wild.

Nick Gilder "Hot Child in the City" For nearly six years, until Casey Kasem's American Top 40 Yearbook covering 1978 set me straight, I was certain this No. 1 hit was being sung by one hot girl about another.

Styx "Come Sail Away" Say what you will about anonymous '70s and early '80s corporate rock, but rock & roll has produced few lead singers as distinctive as Journey's Steve Perry and Styx's Dennis DeYoung. Compared to them, Foreigner's Lou Gramm could have been just about anyone.

Get Off Facebook and Twitter and Get A Life? But This IS Life!

Say what you will about social media and how it's turned us into a global community of technology-obsessed zombies who can no longer engage in real-time conversations and face-to-face relationships if our modern lives depended on it. God knows I've said it all before.

Now and then I wax nostalgic for the good old days, when you met people for the first time in person and exchanged numbers afterwards. Back then, the phone would ring, and you'd wonder, Do I answer, or do I screen? Remember screening your calls? That was so '90s -- along with answering machines, land lines and going home after nights out, pockets full of crumpled napkins with phone numbers scribbled on them.

In those days of social mystery, anticipation and intimate connections ("Will he call?" Not "Will he add me on Facebook?"), if you were the type whose self-worth depended on how other people responded to you, a smile (the precursor to the Facebook "poke") or a kind word was priceless. A postcard or letter in your mailbox (Remember those?) could brighten up a difficult day, or shine a highlight on a lackluster week. I recently subleased an apartment in Cape Town from a woman who couldn't tell me where the mailbox was because she'd never used it.

If you went to work on your birthday (which I never did, except for when I turned 21 and 30, oddly enough), you'd rush home, eager to hear all of the birthday messages on your answering machine. The well-wishers may have been exponentially fewer than you get now with Facebook, but overall the greetings were more heartfelt, coming from people you knew and loved who had more to say than a simple, perfunctory "Happy birthday" (or "Happy day" or "Happy happy birthday," from those aiming for variety). If people remembered, they actually remembered (as opposed to depending on Facebook reminders or threads in which you thanked everyone else for saying it already). Ah, those were the days!

Now we get our ego boosts largely from the kindness and attention of friends and strangers on Facebook and Twitter and whatever other social forums you might be frequenting. (I still refuse to succumb to the rising popularity of Instagram.) Now it's all about "retweets" and "favorites" and "followers" on Twitter, and "likes" on Facebook. The more you have, the better you are. Never before has the infamous Sally Field misquote -- "You like me! You really like me!" -- resonated with such relevance.

Professional life has changed, too. In some ways, social media has done to the art of journalism what reality TV once did to the art of thespianism. Newspapers and magazines are dying, and now anyone with a computer and an Internet connection has a voice. You don't need to have a college degree or even any discernible writing talent. All you need is a sizable social network, a hot topic, and a knack for choosing the right keywords, and wham bam! Baby, you're a writing star!

I miss the days when a compliment from an editor ("Nice work!") was good enough for me (before "visits," "total reach," "most read/popular," Facebook "shares" and "SEO"), the days when the only nasty comments to be dealt with were the ones that occasionally showed up in hate mail when I gave a beloved singer a bad album review in People magazine. Off the clock, those were days when I didn't have access to all of the minutiae of the lives of people I barely know, days when people caught up with me by actually communicating with me, not by reading my Facebook timeline, days before "trolling" and Facebook "stalking."

But were those truly better days?

Although I've been on Facebook for only six years, sometimes before early 2008 feels like another lifetime ago, and the era before everyone had a computer may as well be a galaxy far far away. (Full disclosure time: I joined Facebook and started blogging within the same six-month time frame, and they're now inextricably linked in my usage: If it weren't for the latter, I'd probably barely bother with the former.) Despite the nostalgia I sometimes feel for the way we were, would I want to be go back there?

Answer: absolutely not.

Although I'm a veteran loner who has been traveling solo for more than 20 years, life on my own wasn't always as comfortable as it is today, now that friendship, companionship and reminders of home are always just a few keypad strokes away. There are no more requisite long-distance charges, collect calling or bad connections (unless you're Skype-ing with shitty Wi-Fi). If I were to come home mid-robbery now as I did seven years ago in Buenos Aires, my social network could know all about it while it was still in progress. I refused to give up my iPod to the burglars, so what better time to update my status than while locked in the bathroom waiting for them to leave?

Going to the gym as soon as the robbers leave. Help!

That somehow makes me feel somewhat safer when I'm all alone in great cities.

I can vividly remember wandering through the streets of London and Munich and Amsterdam and Prague and Budapest and Vienna and Lisbon during the last century, thoughts and impressions circling through my head and having no one to tell them to. When a notion popped into my mind -- Wow, the Leaning Tower of Pisa sure is a lot smaller than I imagined it would be -- I couldn't share it immediately with a thousand followers. Of course, I could write everything down (which I never did after my first trip to Europe in 1994) and take pictures of everything I saw (which I always did). But photos took a week to develop back then, and if I wanted to share them with friends, I had to lug them around door to door. Usually, I didn't bother.

Honestly, I'm not sure if I could have lived abroad 10 years ago as happily as I have since I've lived abroad. With social media (via Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, Whatsapp, Skype and the Internet in general), I constantly feel connected to my old life -- to my friends, to my acquaintances, to total strangers around the world. It's easier to be physically alone because I can always find someone to talk to, if I want someone to talk to.

I probably spend less than five minutes a week looking at my Facebook News Feed, so I'm not always up on what's going on in the lives of the 550 people I call my Facebook friends, but I still update my status two or three times a week, comment on those of my friends, and post links for my blog articles to my two Facebook accounts (one for me, one for the blog), and then I can consider all of the responses I receive in return. Sometimes I engage in private email conversations with friends, which can make me feel like we're actually in the same room, or on the telephone, with a slight time delay.

I've yet to master the art of self-promotion on social media, which puts me at a distinct professional disadvantage, and I might never know for sure what a hashtag does. I have no desire to collect thousands of Facebook friends. It already takes me too long to go through the tweets of the 67 people I follow on Twitter. No, I'm hardly a social-media junkie. But I love that reaching out and touching someone has never been easier, quicker or cheaper (which, I suppose, makes it a lot like sex).

I still have friends who are not on Facebook, and a few who are on it, but barely use it, and I regard them the same way I regard people who don't care about music. Boy, are they missing out! (The ones who are on it but never use it are like people who listen to music if it's playing but don't own any music and never know who's singing.) Thank God for them, though. If we live on opposite sides of the world, and we're still in contact with each other, that must mean I really matter to them. (Cheers, Nancy!)

One thing social media hasn't been able to do is increase my sociability in real life. Aside from brief meetings with the photographer who shot the cover of my upcoming book and the guys who are designing it, I haven't socialized at all in the week since the Oscars. Instead I've spent most of the last seven days writing, going for runs around Cape Town, nursing my first cold in nearly four years, and of course, browsing the Internet, whether reading emails, messages on Facebook, Whatsapp messages, indecent proposals on Grindr or the comment boards on my favorite websites (including Daytime Confidential's, the soap opera forum where I can literally spend hours reading the points of view of regulars I'll never meet who hardly feel like strangers).

I haven't gone out at night. Aside from the aforementioned meetings, I haven't had any conversations that consisted of more than a couple of sentences. Yet, it feels like I haven't shut up. By the time the first Sunday since the Oscars rolled around, I was thoroughly exhausted from all the communication. Aside from a few words spoken at the supermarket, I don't think I said anything all day. Yet it still felt like all I did was talk talk talk.

Sometimes I think I'll turn off the computer for an entire day, go out and enjoy the world while leaving my smart phone at home. Maybe I'll walk my two-hour running route from Gardens to Sea Point and back again. Afterwards, I'll have a bacon and feta omelette at Cafe Mojito without my laptop for company or any other form of electronic boredom insurance. I'll just sit there and take in the world around me. I might be completely silent, or I might have a long conversation with a stranger who may or may not add me on Facebook and never talk to me again.

Then I'll rush home, write all about it in this very blog and share it with the world on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google.

Don't forget to "like" it!

Do You Want Crying?: Death Becomes Us -- But Only With Tears on the Side

I get it. I do. I could never condone taking someone else's made-up sob story and passing it off as your own in order to elicit sympathy from your boyfriend, but I sort of understand why Hannah went there at the end of the latest episode of Girls, my favorite of the season so far.

Her e-book editor died, and she was a jumble of mixed emotions to no emotions, and everybody was calling her on it. Ray wanted her to be so distraught that she had to take the day off. Adam wanted her to need his support. And his sister Caroline wanted to witness at least one teardrop explode when she told Hannah a made-up story about a little girl in a tiny dress who died of muscular dystrophy.

But who are they to tell Hannah, who are they to tell anyone, how one should grieve, or that one should grieve at all? Hannah being Hannah couldn't resist making herself the star of her editor's death, so she went around telling everyone that a "close friend" had died. But in fact, David Pressler-Goings was merely an aside on Girls (a memorable one, thanks to Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Rabbit Hole director John Cameron Mitchell's gay-fabulous portrayal of him), a glorified cameo-character, a business associate, one who hadn't even warranted an invitation to Hannah's 25th-birthday party in the previous episode.

A former People magazine editor recently died following a year-long battle with lung cancer, and I surprised myself by dwelling on it in my head for several weeks. I couldn't believe how deeply her passing affected me. She and I hadn't been particularly close, and she'd edited me exactly once during our days at People (She called my description of a track on a Catherine Wheel album "unfathomable," which immediately became one of my favorite words), but we'd reconnected in recent years when we both were columnists for the now defunct (and merged with Forbes.com) website True/Slant.

Her death moved me a lot more than David's nudged Hannah, but neither Hannah nor I actually suffered a loss. A person we knew and worked with died, and for Hannah, he had been in the present tense as recently as the day before, but we didn't actually lose someone.

I'm no monster, and I'd like to think that I'm not cold and callous either, but if I found out that the guy who was about to publish my book was found face-down in the Hudson River ("right by Chelsea Pier, just floating there") after he didn't show up for our morning meeting, you can bet your bottom dollar that one of my first three questions would be the one I was asking myself while watching that opening scene of Girls' fourth episode of the third season: What about the book?

I've been there before. Not exactly in Hannah's earth-tone shoes, but I've found myself wondering what would happen if someone I was doing business with were to suddenly up and die. In fact, I wondered this as recently as last year. The subject of my death what-if is alive and well, and our business deal went off without any funerals, but if he were to pass away in an untimely fashion in a month or two (heaven forbid), I'd be surprised, maybe sad even. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't shed a tear.

After all, I didn't cry nearly 13 years ago after the mother of a good friend of mine found his body in the bathtub with his throat slit. (Don't stop me if you think you've heard this one before, for unlike Hannah, I'm about to repeat my own story.) I was crushed, especially since we'd had a huge fight on Fire Island over the Fourth of July weekend a few weeks earlier, and the last words I'd ever said to him were "Fuck you!" as I stormed off to catch the ferry back to civilization.

I didn't find out about his death until a day after it happened, early one Sunday morning in August, when I received a phone call from the NYPD. The officer on the other end requested my presence at the Grammercy Park station. He had a few questions to ask me about my friend, he said, calling him by his full name, which sounded strange because I never used it, always shortening it to just the first three letters.

I knew it had to be pretty serious, or he would have interviewed me by phone, and he wouldn't have referred to him using six letters instead of three. My friend lived recklessly, so aside from the fact that we had been estranged for weeks, the phone call didn't take me completely by surprise. I wasn't, however, expecting the worst. When it arrived, it was delivered in the most awkward way: "I'm afraid that your friend is no longer with us."

The cop wouldn't offer any specifics, but he was questioning everyone whose number was stored in the deceased's mobile phone. "Were you close?... When did you see him last?... Was he into any risky behavior?..." I tried to answer his questions as succinctly as possible without invading my late friend's privacy. I was still trying to process his passing, so despite the dire line of questioning, in my mind, he was still out there somewhere, just missing.

I knew I was a suspect and that I wasn't doing myself any favors by being so calm and unemotional. Where were my tears? I tried to make up for my lack of waterworks by wearing what I thought was the appropriate facial expression for such a moment, settling on the look of shocked confusion you might have if you were to open your front door and the person on the other side of it greeted you with a slap across the face. I adjusted my tone of voice and my body language (slightly slumped, head bowed) to match the darkness I was feeling on the inside. A black cloud was hovering over my heart, leaving my soul overcast, on the verge of swelling with rain. But the showers never came, not on the outside.

The next day, I went to work, business as usual. I was despondent, like a zombie going through the motions. My colleagues were sympathetic, but had I not told them what had happened, they might not even have known that anything was wrong. My boss told me to go home, and I said I wanted to work. I wonder whether they thought I was incredibly strong, or heartless for holding it together so well.

No one called me out for not being inconsolable, but I scolded myself enough for all of us. So Hannah's disapproving Greek chorus, their judgmental decree on what grieving should sound/look like was all too familiar to me. Hannah has shown that she's capable of being a compassionate friend indeed, as recently as two episodes ago, when she rented a car and took a road trip with Adam and Shoshanna to pick up Jessa from rehab. So even if she doesn't have the florid words to convince Adam that she'd be crushed if something were to happen to him, I have no doubt that she would have mourned appropriately (in the eyes of her friends) had it been someone close to her whose body had been found floating in the Hudson River.

Her reaction, actually, wasn't that different from that of so many people after September 11, which happened just weeks after my friend's passing. I lost track of how many of them, the ones who weren't in New York City who presumably felt left out of being at the epicenter of the grieving, tried to insert themselves into the tragedy by offering stories about the friend of a friend of a friend who used to date someone whose cousin used to work in the World Trade Center, or by explaining that they very well may have been on that American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to L.A. that crashed into the North tower, but they'd had to cancel their vacation and stay home in Florida.

People do and say strange things when dealing with tragedy, and rather than telling them how they should be grieving, judgmental friends should ask themselves what gives them the right to police how someone else grieves. Are they wondering how their own death would go over with the non-griever should, heaven forbid, they be next to go?

Geez. Not even Hannah Horvath is that self-involved.

Despite Some Progress, Black Is Still Not the New Black in Hollywood

As we reach the denouement of another year in real and reel life (with so many 2013 films left to see in 2014: When, oh when, will my beloved Joaquin Phoenix and Her finally arrive in South Africa?), my increased black consciousness in Cape Town and Hollywood's increasing consciousness of blacks (due, for the most part, to the work of a handful of black directors and a ticket-buying public that's clearly interested in the stories they have to tell) have got me thinking. Here are some of the thoughts running through my mind this New Year's Eve.

***I still remember People magazine's "Hollywood Blackout" cover story as clearly as if I were still working there. The article, which made me proud to call myself a People reporter (though I had nothing to do with the piece) bemoaned a year (1996) without any black Oscar nominees in the acting categories and only one in any of the others. My how things have changed yet haven't.

Though Oscar seems to have recovered somewhat from its blackout since People shined a spotlight on it, I've noticed some intriguing patterns in its increasing inclusiveness? In recent years, there usually have been multiple black Oscar nominees, and this century alone, seven black winners in the acting categories (three Best Actors, one Best Actress, one Best Supporting Actor and two Best Supporting Actresses). Curiously, though, many of the recent black nominees have been newcomers with hard-to-pronounce and/or remember names, like Gabourey Sidibe and Quvenzhané Wallis, who fail to become stars and are unlikely to be nominated again.

Despite being a Best Actress nominee this year for Beasts of the Southern Wild, Wallis's name doesn't even appear on the poster for 12 Years a Slave, in which she has a don't-blink-and-you-might-still-miss-her role as the protagonist's daughter. I still believe Slave's finale would have been more effective had we had even one scene of Northup's family coping with his disappearance and hence a little more Wallis.

Perhaps next year's Jay-Z/Will Smith-produced Annie update will reverse that trend and possibly even get Wallis another invitation to the Golden Globes as a nominee. Will three of this year's seven main black Oscar-nomination contenders with names that don't necessarily roll off English-speaking tongues -- Slave's Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong'o and Captain Phillips' Barkhad Abdi, all Golden Globe-nominated -- be so lucky in the future? Will Mo'Nique (a Best Supporting Actress winner for Precious whose name practically sings star) finally get another acting gig?

***Djimon Hounsou bucked the one-nomination-wonder trend by going from the star of a Janet Jackson video ("Love Will Never Do [Without You]") to a two-time Oscar nominee (for 2002's In America and 2006's Blood Diamond), but it still feels as if he's waiting for his breakthrough. (Of all the black actors to be nominated more than once since 2000 -- a list that includes Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Will Smith and Jamie Foxx -- only Hounsou and Viola Davis weren't already established stars.) Why did someone with his good looks and considerable talent never quite go mainstream?

***On the flip side is six-time Oscar nominee Denzel Washington, who has been one of Hollywood's biggest stars since the '90s. Why is he the only black thespian who gets nominated for roles that could have been played by an actor of any color? (Incidentally, if Lee Daniels' The Butler's Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey get nominated for their roles in the 2013 film, it will be both of their second times scoring a nod for embodying characters that could have been played only by black actors.) It dawned on me while watching Captain Phillips that Washington would have been great in that movie, but Hollywood would sooner try to make Angelina Jolie pass for multiracial (which she attempted as Marianne Pearl in 2007's A Mighty Heart) before even thinking about casting Washington as a real-life white man.

***Why do most of the big '90s indie auteurs-turned-Oscar-caliber-directors (Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne, David O. Russell, Darren Aronofsky), in the grand tradition of the Woody Allens and Robert Altmans of Hollywood past and present, rarely to never cast black actors in their movies? I guess Russell did put Ice Cube in The Three Kings and Chris Tucker in Silver Linings Playbook, but would the latter movie really have suffered without Tucker's character, the only one played by an above-the-title actor that Oscar didn't notice? People criticize Quentin Tarantino for peppering (okay, dousing) his screenplays with the N word, but at least he isn't afraid to put black actors in his movies.

***Speaking of black actors in Quentin Tarantino films (namely last year's Django Unchained), is being the star of one of the hottest shows on TV Kerry Washington's consolation prize for being under-appreciated and underutilized in movies? I've only watched Scandal in passing, but from what I've seen, Olivia Pope could have been played by an actress of any color, which for Washington (no relation to Denzel) might be an even greater accomplishment than scoring an elusive (for her, despite excellent work in Django, Mother and Child, Ray and The Last King of Scotland, the last two opposite Best Actors Jamie Foxx and Forest Whitaker, respectively) Oscar nomination.

***The fact that most of the recent black Oscar nominees and all of this year's black possibilities (including Fruitvale Station's Michael B. Jordan and Octavia Spencer) were playing real-life characters or characters from literary adaptations underscores a continuing trend. Although there are more opportunities for black actors in quality dramas, Hollywood filmmakers still aren't creating quality black movie characters -- and if they are, they're being played by white actors.

***Male black voices are finally being heard from the other side of the camera, with three of this year's most successful and/or critically hailed films (Lee Daniels' The Butler, 12 Years a Slave and Fruitvale Station) directed by black men (Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen and Ryan Coogler, respectively). Meanwhile, though, where are the black female directors? Halle Berry produces, but there seems to be few black women in positions of power on movie sets. If there were, perhaps Angela Bassett would finally get a post-What's Love Got to Do With It? role worthy of her talent, and Viola Davis, who seemed so destined for stardom after The Help a few years ago, would be getting better and meatier work than always being part of an ensemble or playing second lead to Maggie Gyllenhaal (in 2012's Won't Back Down).

***Since the days when Ally McBeal had a black boyfriend and his skin color wasn't a plot point, prime-time TV and daytime soaps have featured a number of interracial couples for which race isn't an issue or part of the storyline. Often it's not even mentioned at all. (Curiously, though, with the exceptions of Smash, Two and a Half Men and probably a few other shows, gay and lesbian couples remain largely white-on-white.) When will the big-screen play catch up? In big Hollywood movies, black actors get little to no romance. The biggest male stars, the Denzel Washingtons and the Will Smiths, rarely get cast in romances and no black actress has ever been a contender for America's sweetheart. The surprise success of The Best Man Holiday proves that people will pay to see black people in love, but it doesn't have to always be with each other. Despite the gains made by blacks over the last 17 years, they remain largely separate and unequal in Hollywood films. May 2014 and beyond bring greater strides in desegregation.

"Service Not Included" and Other Words That Make Me Cringe This Week

I never thought it could happen, but I might actually be starting to warm up to five words that have placed countless chills in my heart over the course of the last year: "It is what it is."

I still think it's the easiest way to ruin an intelligent discussion, and I stand by all of the negative things I've written about it, but I recently discovered that it could be the perfect way to put a mind-numbing line of questioning out of its misery, too. For example:

"But what do you have against shopping?"

"Nothing. I just don't enjoy it."

"Why don't you enjoy it?"

"Does there have to be a specific reason? I just don't enjoy it."

"But why?"

"Look, it is what it is!"

Yes, I used it, and I reserve the right to do so again in the future if desperation hits. And even if it one day becomes a fixture in my personal lexicon, it's not like I don't have plenty of other dreadful words to carp about.

"Service not included" The bane of my existence in Tel Aviv, the tipping capital of the world. On my first day here, somebody warned me that if I walked out of any service establishment without leaving a little something behind (the standard is 12 percent), they'd follow me outside to admonish me/remind me of my unofficial obligation. Apparently, the custom extends outside of Tel Aviv. Yesterday during lunch at The Pisan Harbour in Akko, when the surly waiter handed me the bill (which was completely in Hebrew) and announced, "Service not included," just in case I couldn't understand the written words, I came dangerously close to asking, "What service?" He hadn't cracked a smile all hour, and he made me wait a good 30 minutes for my kebab main course. Instead I held my tongue and handed him 110 NIS for a 95 NIS bill. "Thank you," he sniffed as he walked away, still scowling. I guess service and a smile costs extra!

"What are you doing in Tel Aviv?" Not to be confused with "Are you here on holiday/for work?", due to the hint of incredulity and the dash of disdain with which the question is typically posed, as in "Why on earth, of all the cities on earth, would anyone chose to come here?" Among unfathomable, overused travel/expat inquiries, this one is rapidly approaching "Do you like Buenos Aires?" (previously frequently asked by porteños after they found out I'd been living in their city for years). I mean, come on. It's not like Tel Aviv is on the outskirts of Timbuktu. Considering that it's a major international city that has topped countless lists of the world's top travel destinations in recent years, what's the big mystery? So unless you're working in Customs, why not ask me how I like it?

"Can I pick your brain?" Every time I hear or read this, I have a horrifying vision of vultures descending on a live cranium. The other day when a good friend and a writer I respect and admire above all others became the third person in one week to used it on me, I had my most nightmarish visual image yet: her hosting a dinner party, walking around and offering her guests chunks of my brain on a plate with toothpicks sticking out of them. Yikes!

"Let's dance!" I don't know what's happened to me. I don't even really want to hear David Bowie sing it anymore. Anyone who knew me in the '90s, or attended one of People magazine's holiday parties back then, knows that I used to be the ultimate dancing queen. Nowadays it takes a village to get me on the dance floor. My friend Rodrigo was the first to point out my presumed aversion to the beat during one of our nights out at DJ Station in Bangkok. And the other evening at Evita in Tel Aviv, similar entreaties for me to get my boogie down fell on deaf ears -- mine.

I could take the easy way out and say that at 44, one should put away his boogies shoes for good, but what's age got to do with it? Yes, I hate nightclubs, but my biggest problem with them isn't the dance floor but the soundtrack. I refuse to move to this contemporary techno crap that they call music when I have perfectly vivid memories of another time and place (circa the 1990s in New York City) when dance divas like Kristine W., Joi Cardwell, Ultra Nate and Billie Ray Martin ruled the world underneath the strobelight, honey (to quote the title of one of my favorite jams from back in those days). David Guetta can't even begin to compete with David Morales!

"What are you looking for?" Now there are five words that should never be uttered outside of the lost and found. When I was a kid and used to go to the mall with my mother, whenever a salesperson approached her and asked "Can I help you?" (the retail equivalent of "What are you looking for?"), she'd roll her eyes and snarl, "Can I look?" I've inherited her disdain for pushy salespeople, which now extends to pushy guys on online dating sites who ask "What are you looking for?" before asking your name. (Translation: "I came here for sex, and unless you did, too, I'm not looking to waste any more time on you.") Can they make those places seem any more like virtual meat markets? I've taken to using "I'll know it when I find him?" because "Apparently, not you" didn't go over so well.

"T.K.O." T.K.O. T.K.O. So I'm not cringing, but I'm thoroughly perplexed. The late Teddy Pendergrass's 1980 classic "Love T.K.O." (covered enchantingly by Regina Belle in 1995) remains one of my all-time favorite seduction suites, even if I've never quite gotten it. Now Justin Timberlake's humdrum current single, simply "TKO" (no relation), has revived the question that's stumped me for decades: What the H.E.L.L. is a "T.K.O." -- and whom do I have to sleep with to score one, if it's actually something worth scoring (and I'm not convinced that it is)? Oh well, at least I still get to enjoy the song -- "Love T.K.O.," not "TKO"!

Days of the Week: Why Tel Aviv Is Thoroughly Confusing Me

One might expect more from someone who's done as much traveling as I have over the course of the last two decades, since 1993, the year I had my first out-of-the-country experience: an off-site in Bermuda with some of my colleagues at People magazine.

"What? They drive on the left side of the road here? I haven't seen that before."

Bermuda might as well have been another planet because of the peculiar driving habits there, an experience that I repeated one year later when I returned to my birthplace, the U.S. Virgin Islands, for the first time since I was 4 years old.

After at least a dozen trips to London I still hadn't become accustomed to left-side driving and didn't get used to it until I spent two and a half years based in Melbourne and Bangkok, where left-side driving applies. Now I'm such a leftie that when I was in Buenos Aires earlier this year, I kept trying to go up on the left-side escalator, and in rightie Tel Aviv, I'm always walking on the wrong side of the sidewalk, to the left, to the left.

Though I now think mostly in terms of Metric, I still haven't built up an immunity to culture shock, a talent for learning foreign languages (I tackled Spanish only because I absolutely had to), or a habit of picking up local slang and incorporating it into my everyday speech. (I may sometimes text "tomoz" for "tomorrow" because it's shorter, but I refuse to use "arvo" for "afternoon" or start calling everybody "mate"!)

So I had absolutely no reason to expect that I would so easily become accustomed to the forward shift in the days of the week brought on by Shabbat (aka, Saturday, or, technically, sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, which is treated the way Sunday is outside of Israel and in the predominantly Muslim and Christian Israeli city of Nazareth). But there I was, days before my first Shabbat, already thinking of Monday as Tuesday, Tuesday as Wednesday and so on, until Saturday, which felt exactly like Sunday, only lazier.

By the time that first Shabbat rolled around, I was already thinking exactly like I do on Sunday everywhere else in the world and accepting the new days dynamic. Everything's closed today? Annoying, but okay. Friday and Saturday were the weekend? I can live with that. The Mamas and the Papas' "Monday Monday" would be the perfect soundtrack to Sunday, which, technically, is just another manic Monday? Got it.

But now, after three weeks, confusion has set in, for in my mind, I'm not only thinking of the days here as their equivalent days everywhere else, but I've also begun to think that it's actually the equivalent day. I keep forgetting what day it is. When I woke up this morning, Sunday morning, I thought of it as Monday. During my morning jog, people were starting to head to work as if it were Monday. If yesterday felt sort of melancholy in that only-on-a-Sunday way, today the world felt resigned to the weekdays ahead, just like on Mondays.

The real Wednesday, not the
one I keep thinking Tuesday is.

I almost missed a fun night out because of my confusion. You see, today, Sunday, someone invited me to Lima Lima, a Monday night party here in Tel Aviv, one that I went to two weeks ago and enjoyed immensely. "Ah, that's too bad," I muttered to myself, instinctively thinking tonight was Lima Lima night, because, you know, I thought it was Monday afternoon at the time. Unfortunately, I have a Skype interview at 7am tomorrow morning, which means tonight my bed time will fall even earlier than usual. I can't turn on the camera on my laptop with big bags under my eyes.

Had I thought things out completely, I would have remembered that my Skype interview was on Monday and panicked. I might have mistakenly thought I'd missed my Skype interview because it is scheduled for Monday at 7am, and at what I subconsciously thought was 7am on Monday, I was starting my morning run along the beach. But although I'd been living today as a Monday in my head, I never actually took the time out to name the day in my head.

I'm not sure what snapped me back to reality, but I recovered from my cluelessness before I had a chance to panic or miss a really fun party. Today might function as a Monday here in Tel Aviv, but everybody still calls it Sunday when speaking in English, which means that both my Skype interview and Lima Lima will be tomorrow, the real Monday, which will only feel like Tuesday. Looks like I can fit in both, after all.

Hopefully, I'll get this days-of-the-week thing straight in my head soon. I'm leaving Tel Aviv next Sunday, which, though it'll arrive in the spirit of a Monday, will still be one week from today, a Sunday that only feels like a Monday. I wouldn't want to mix things up in my head and try to go to the airport on Saturday, Shabbat, thinking it's Sunday, the day of my scheduled departure. The airports are closed on Saturday.

But then, I'm not leaving Tel Aviv by plane but rather, by bus, to Jerusalem. Public transportation doesn't run on Shabbat, though, so who knows how I'd get there next Saturday, if I was thinking of it as Sunday? So it looks like I won't be going anywhere, even if I mix up my days again.

Thankfully, the other two invitations I've received for the coming week, came with dates (October 16 and 18), not days attached. I've saved the dates, and I shouldn't have any problem keeping them straight. I've always been so much better with numbers than with names.

Seven Years, Seven Lessons: What I've Learned from Living Abroad

Seven years ago today, on September 15, 2006, I embarked on a bumpy ride along a rocky road less traveled. I heeded every warning sign along the way, carefully considering each one without letting any of them throw me off course or stop me altogether, entering and marching through brand new worlds of possibility, discovery and occasional bouts of fear. I can't believe I've already been traveling this road for so long. Time flies when you're having fun taking chances.

When I relocated from New York City to Buenos Aires that day, I went from a life of stability and certainty (as a full-time employee in one city) to a life of surprises and uncertainty (as a freelancer in multiple cities) and rotated from a circle of friends to a circle of one. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, trembling, because I have no idea what my future holds or where I'll be living when it rolls around, but I've become accustomed to question marks, and I've always liked the way they look.

I have no doubt that I'll eventually settle back into some semblance of my old lifestyle (one city, one job, minus the obsession with material possessions, a demon I believe I've conquered for good), and when I do, I'll have a better grip on both myself and the people around me, thanks to the valuable life lessons I've learned living abroad, which brings me to the first one.

1. A jerk is a jerk is a jerk -- no matter what language he's speaking. The names might change (the other night at Circolo Degli Artisti in Rome, I met my first-ever Gianluca, which is a name I'm pretty sure I'd never encounter anywhere but in Italy) and so might the opening lines (who would have expected "Sexy!" to be so popular in Germany?), but guys disappoint in such predictable ways pretty much everywhere.

The ones in Italy are cruder and ruder in their pursuit of meaningless sex than the ones in Germany and Australia, and Thais are less inclined to offer florid declarations of love within one hour of meeting you than Argentines, but all over the world, men can and will piss you off with equal efficacy. They stand you up with that all too familiar callousness (no call, no text), are generally interested in sex only, and when the hammer falls, as it inevitably does, it hurts just as bad everywhere (if you really liked the guy), or it's as much of a relief (if you really didn't).

And an increasingly peripatetic international gay community makes it harder to assign character traits to specific countries. Once during my early nights at DJ Station in Bangkok, when a guy shook my hand and then tried to place it around his exposed private part, I was tempted to put it in my "Only in Bangkok" column (and yes, that's the sort of thing that's more likely to happen in Bangkok than anywhere else I've been over the course of the last seven years), but the man with the dangling dick was a Swedish expat who had spent most of his adult life living in Boston.

Who knows where he learned that trick? I've never been to Sweden, but I'm fairly certain it's not an acceptable Scandinavian custom, and I know for a fact that's not how they do it in Boston. But in Bangkok, a city filled with men from all over the world, wild things run fast, embracing the sort of inappropriateness that some men are inclined to engage in not because they're from any particular country but because they're men.

2. Commitment is a lot scarier than turbulence. Look at me now: I'm having trouble committing to a rental agreement for longer than one month (which makes the three-month one I signed in Melbourne earlier this year a small miracle), to one city, country, or continent, or even to a return ticket from anywhere. What if I want to stay (longer)? Or leave early?

Sometimes I can't believe that I worked for my first post-college employer, People magazine, for a whopping eight years. Today, the idea of a full-time job in which I have to be physically present in an office at least five days a week, eight hours a day, fills me with dread. And don't get me started on the dreaded C word when it comes to guys. I've only used it on two in the past seven years, and the last one was more than four years ago.

I wasn't always so gun shy in my personal life. I used to be the kind of person who loved making plans and having my entire weekend sorted out in advance. Now if I already have a Saturday night date on Thursday, it just feels like a noose around my neck. I spend all day and all of the night on Friday and most of Saturday praying that I won't be the one to have to cancel it. Thankfully, No. 1 holds true in this area, too: My would-be dates rarely disappoint -- and it's usually at the last minute, if they bother to call, or text, or email, at all.

3. Traveling sucks. There's a big difference between traveling and being in new city or country or continent, and if that difference is more than an hour or two, I'm over it. If only I could snap my fingers and magically appear in my next destination. I need to get bewitched by my own personal Samantha Stevens, have my dream of Jeannie come true, or get a job on the Starship Enterprise, so that I can be transported to far-off locales in a matter of seconds.

This going to and from airports, dealing with long lines, security checks, taking off my belt and shoes, removing my laptop from my backpack, Customs and baggage claiming -- well, I could really live without it. And before my recent return to traveling through Europe by train, I'd somehow romanticized the entire process in my head. In my current reality, it just puts me in too-close proximity to strangers when I'd rather be alone, which brings me to my next lesson....

4. Only you (and you alone) is the best company you can keep. I've always known this, but living on my own abroad has turned me into an even bigger recluse than I was before. Moving to countries where I know few people, if anyone, and often can't speak the language, has resulted in some blissful moments of silence that sometimes can last as much as one week. Some of my happiest days in Buenos Aires came before I took my first Spanish lesson and could finally begin to understand what people were saying to and around me. Of course, it's easier to enjoy the silence when you can communicate without uttering a word, which brings me to my next lesson....

5. Modern life is not all rubbish -- as I already pointed out two posts ago. Not to contradict the 20-year-old album title by Blur (1993's Modern Life Is Rubbish), but I have no burning desire to return to the way we were. I think I fooled myself into believing that I was indifferent to technological progress for a long time because I'm always a little -- a lot -- behind the curve. I bought my first computer (a Sony VAIO laptop) in 2001; I didn't know what an iPod was until everyone else already had one; and I only got around to purchasing a smart phone in January. In some ways, I was stuck in the '90s -- back when I was still using a Discman, landlines and my friends' computers -- too long after they were over. I might always be a little late to the party, but once I arrive, you can't get me to leave.

I already pointed out my current tech dependency in that previous post, but one thing I didn't mention in it was my addiction to Wi-Fi. I can live with a telephone (I haven't filled mine with credit since I left Australia in June), but that's pretty easy to do when anything you can do on a phone you can do on your laptop if you've got Wi-Fi. And I must have Wi-Fi. I checked out of a perfectly lovely hotel in Bali after one night just because there was no Wi-Fi in the rooms, and I never travel anywhere without my Acer Aspire One mini-Notebook.

I'm not sure how I used to keep in touch with everyone back home when I was on the road. Maybe I didn't. Back in 2006, I don't think I even knew what Wi-Fi was (truly -- I only discovered the miracle that is Bluetooth a few months ago), the idea of traveling with my laptop seemed insane (though I was always relieved to check into a hotel with computers in the business center), I thought YouTube was a passing fad which couldn't pass fast enough, and my only knowledge of Facebook was via those invitations I'd occasionally get from plugged in friends which I would continue to ignore for two more years. Now I wonder if I'd love being away from home as much as I do today if I had to do it the way I did it in 2006.

6. Running is good for the mind, body and soul -- and its not a bad way to sightsee! Although it feels like it's always been a major part of my life, I didn't start running around towns until a few weeks after I moved to Buenos Aires. I initially went on the run because I needed my exercise, and I couldn't find a gym that I wanted to join, but now I do it as much for the mental benefits as the physical ones. I write some of my best blog posts in my head while I'm running up and down hills, around lakes and along rivers, and nothing short of a shot of tequila soothes my cranky disposition the way an hour of roadwork does.

7. I'm a boy of summer at heart. I used to spend August counting down the days until September and the arrival of autumn. Now I don't believe I own a single turtleneck, which used to be one of my wardrobe staples. Besides leaving my friends behind, the hardest part of departing from New York City in September was that I'd be missing my then-favorite season and jumping right into the frying pan in Buenos Aires, where the seasons are reversed.

Seven years later, I find myself diligently avoiding cold weather and shuddering at the thought of a turtleneck. I don't know if this is the real me or just a temporary one, but my ongoing life-long disdain for winter sports might be a clue that I've always been a summer lover deep inside. I haven't experienced winter since my last one in Buenos Aires, in 2010, and if it weren't for the approach of autumn in Europe, I'd probably be heading to Amsterdam in a week instead of Tel Aviv. But I have a few winter clothes on hand should I change my mind because of all the lessons I've learned in seven years, the biggest one is that I'll probably change my mind.

Should the Austin, Texas, Police Slap Justin Carter's Wrist and Let His "Terrorist Threat" on Facebook Go?

People say the darndest, dumbest things.

I've known this since I was in kindergarten and someone called me the N word for the first time. I had no idea what it meant, but I didn't like the way it sounded. Ironically, the kid who uttered it was black, and he explained that it was a term of endearment for tall people, launching my childhood-long complex about always being the tallest student in class.

The years of stupid words that followed didn't prepare me for the ones I read some 19 years ago when I dared to dislike Mary Chapin Carpenter's Stones in the Road album (minus "Shut Up and Kiss Me," her only No. 1 country hit and one of the genre's best songs of the '90s) in my People magazine review of it. A few weeks after my critique ran, I received a letter from someone who didn't appreciate my unkind comments about the work of such a talented and acclaimed singer-songwriter.

"Young Helligar," the missive began, giving birth to a new workplace nickname that was intended to partly mock the reader and also acknowledge the fact that I was one of the youngest people on staff. And he was just getting started. His ire built over the course of the one-page handwritten letter, in which he blasted my taste in music and my lifestyle ("cushy," he called it, obviously unaware that I was living in a tiny studio apartment in Alphabet City), and, at the end, he firmly put me in my place: "One day, I'm going to hunt you down, and when I find you, I'm going to... laugh in your face!"

"..."? Really? Just laugh? For a second there, I had thought my life was in danger, that he was going to track me down and blow me away. Then I got to the punchline.

I know, I probably shouldn't have wasted even a split second on worry. When rational thinking returned, I somehow couldn't imagine a disgruntled reader traveling to the Time and Life Building in New York City to eliminate me (or even to simply giggle at me) just because we didn't share the same music taste. I know how rabid fandom can be, and as a blogger, I've gotten the nasty comments to prove it (especially when I once made the huge mistake of dismissing NCIS!), but sometimes readers only want to read opinions that line up with theirs. I try not to take it personally.

But then, you can never be too safe. That must have been what the Canadian woman who reported Justin Carter of Austin, Texas, to the police in February must have been thinking. During a Facebook altercation with someone involving an online video game called "League of Legends" (the playing of which may have been his biggest crime), Carter, 18, responded thusly to a charge of insanity made by the other person:

"Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts"
lol
jk"

The comment must have hit too close to the December shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that left 20 children and six faculty members dead. When the Canadian woman Googled Carter and found an old address for him that was near an elementary school, she panicked and reported him. The police responded by charging Carter with making terrorist threats and putting him in jail, where he's been since March 27. He now faces up to eight years in prison if he's convicted.

If you didn't think that Facebook could ruin your life, well, here's proof. As an adult, Carter should know better. When you write stupid, offensive things online, sometimes it's not enough to brush it aside with an "lol" afterthought. What he wrote was not particularly funny or clever, and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't get a single "like."

But Carter's biggest crime (aside from playing silly video games) was typing without thinking and making a bad joke, which is hardly a felony. No, you can never be too safe when it comes to guns and children, but there are certainly more effective safety measures out there than locking up a kid for three months and threatening to ruin his life. Haven't they had plenty of time to thoroughly investigate Carter and determine if he's an actual threat?

I'm not going to cite the First Amendment as a viable defense as the online petition calling for Carter's release did because I think freedom of speech is already overused by people to defend harmful comments and ideas. But even without the "lol" and "jk," he was clearly being facetious. A slap on the wrist, or a fine would have sufficed, but if they must waste taxpayer dollars and try him in court, does he not qualify to be out on bail until then? Is the Austin legal system afraid that he'll get a gun and make good on his "threat"?

In a sense, I get it. In past incidents, ignoring obvious warning signs (like mental illness, or a history of borderline psychotic behavior) has led to tragedy, and the police probably want to avoid similar negligence on their watch. But this is not the way to go about it.

While they are focusing their attention on what is most likely a harmless, ignorant kid, dangerous people are out there developing sinister plots that they can easily carry out because of ineffective gun-control laws, terrible campus security and a legal system that is more preoccupied with punishing misguided sarcasm on Facebook than making preemptive strikes against bonafide threats.

I only hope it doesn't take a real one unleashing its deadly fury on Austin or some nearby town to help them see the error of their overreaction to Justin Carter's Facebook folly. It's time for them to move on and fight the real enemies of state, security and little innocent children.

The Importance of Ohio

I've got to admit, over the course of my lifetime, I've rarely given the U.S. state of Ohio a second thought. That's not due to anything I have against it -- in fact, over the course of the same lifetime, I've had a number of highly regarded friends who hail from the Buckeye State -- but because despite being the 7th most populous of the 50 United States (according to its Wikipedia page), Ohio is generally not one of the more high-profile ones, especially abroad. As the Great Lakes states in its vicinity go, Michigan has always gotten a lot more play!

So it's been something of a surprise this Election Day to hear so many political pundits identifying Ohio as the key swing state in the 2012 U.S. Presidential race. To hear them tell it, the winner (of Ohio) would likely take all (the election). Wasn't that honor traditionally supposed to go to my home state of Florida?

Interestingly, less than a week ago, I met Matthew, an Ohioan who has been living in Asia for more than a decade but has been settled in Singapore for the last two years. So many coincidences!

"Let me guess, you're from Youngstown," I asked him the second time we saw each other. Honestly, I actually didn't expect him to be. I was only half-joking. Ever since my days as an editor at Teen People, where we once gave coverage to an aspiring boy band named Youngstown, after its city of origin, Youngstown (the city, not the group) has been the first thing I think about whenever anyone mentions Ohio.

"How did you know that? I thought nobody outside of Ohio had ever heard of Youngstown." Matthew was completely in shock and even more in awe.

"Well..." I tried to think of a clever response, one that didn't involve a failed boy band from the turn of the century. "Are there any other cities in Ohio?"

Matthew was shocked by my ignorance, and by the time he was through with me, so was I. "Let's see, there's Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, and the capital, Columbus."

I'd thought of Cincinnati and Cleveland immediately after I'd feigned ignorance, but how could I forget Toledo and Columbus? Thanks to Matthew's enlightenment, even before I started closely following the election coverage, I was beginning to realize that Ohio is a much bigger deal than I'd thought. I can't even name six cities in many other states off the top of my head.

And now that I think about it, I've actually been to Ohio, exactly once. In 1995, when I did a feature story for People magazine on Babyface, I traveled with him and his band from Detroit to Cleveland in his tour bus. I don't remember much about Ohio, or Cleveland, other than that I was happy to board the plane to fly back to New York City after one night there, but that was more because I missed my boyfriend at the time than anything having to do with the city.

Though Ohio may not have ended up playing as pivotal a role in Barack Obama's re-election as everyone was claiming it would (turns out he still would have won without it), I'll never ever underestimate it again.

Ohio in Pop Culture

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

WKRP in Cincinnati

Hot in Cleveland

 "Ohio" Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

"Toledo" Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach

The Oh in Ohio

The Anniversary That I Wish I Could Forget

St. Vincent's: gone (since April 2012), but not forgotten

One October 8, I gave my then-boyfriend a not-so-subtle reminder.

"Do you know what day today is?"

"Um, Saturday?"

"Um, no. It's the one-year anniversary of the day we met."

Long, awkward pause...

"How do you even remember that?!"

I didn't know how to break the news to him: He was dating the guy who put the last word into "super freak." In my defense, though, I've always had a thing for dates (specifically, months and days). I'm terrible with names, and hit and miss and hit with years, but give me a month and day on which something semi-significant occurs -- say, May 7, my birthday; August 13, my first day on the job at People magazine; or October 1, the day I moved into my first, second and third Manhattan apartments -- and they'll stay with me forever.

That's why I can't believe I'd never thought of it before, especially yesterday while I was writing about the significance of last July 5, until my friend Dave reminded me in a post on my Facebook Timeline. Five years and two days before that (last July 5), I had the first of three major panic attacks that would send me to the ER of St. Vincent's Hospital in the West Village in the two and a half months before I left New York City for Buenos Aires. (It was also the day I took Klonopin for the first time, but enough about that.)

I can remember that day before Independence Day like it was yesterday (which is strange, because I couldn't tell you what I did that Independence Day, or what I was doing on any day before the Fourth of July in any other given year, though I'm pretty certain I was probably packing for my trip to Bangkok last July 3). It was the day after Dave, his parents and I saw Madonna's "Confessions on the Dance Floor" concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

I swear I wasn't even thinking about Madonna the moment it hit me late that Monday afternoon. I was sitting on my couch watching TV, when I felt a surge of anxiety and dread pass through my body. It was the first time it had ever happened while it was light outside, and when I wasn't trying to fall asleep. I remember walking to the ER, the panic rising, hoping, praying, it would magically disappear.

I remember my entire body vibrating by the time I arrived at the ER, feeling like it might be crushed by the weight of the imaginary giant anvil pressing down hard on my head. I couldn't even stand still long enough to tell the nurse what was happening because I felt like if I stopped for one second I would explode. "Goodbye, cruel world," I recall thinking to myself, as I prepared for my body to drop. Several hours and a my first-ever Klonopin later, I had an official diagnosis: I'd had a full-blown panic attack.

Fortunately, like most of the other anniversaries occupying my mind these days, this one had a happy ending: Although I was ready to die at the beginning of the story, four days short of six years later, I'm still around to tell it.