COLUMBIA, MD -

I grew up in a small village on the Connecticut River in northern New Hampshire. There were more trees and cows than there were people and up until I was a surly teenager, I loved it.

Then puberty hit and I despised my little hamlet. Outside of my family, there wasn’t a single reason to stay and every day brought me closer to college and escape.

Now I’m 10 years past that day and 4 years past the day I left New England completely behind and every fall my heart hurts. It’s like the ache you associate with an old injury, the kind of pain cold weather and rainy days bring.

Leaving New England was like breaking up with a childhood romance.

I often wonder if I’ll ever get over it completely.

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COLUMBIA, MARYLAND -

In approximately 5 days, I will be a year older.

This seems somewhat impossible, this gain in age, and yet the calendar refuses to budge on it. A year ago, at this very moment in time, I was waiting in distaste for my birthday to come.

Not today, though. Today, for the first time in what feels like forever, I am welcoming my birthday with open arms.

Well, only if it brings cake. Should my birthday forget to bring cake, I’ll be forced to lock it out of the house. (more…)

COLUMBIA, MD -

I date the wrong kind of men.

I really do and I kind of always have.

Lately, if I find myself attracted to a guy, I immediately wonder two things:

     1) How badly is this going to suck in a month?

     2) How big of an asshole is he?

The correlation between my attraction and the answer to those questions is definitely a positive one…as one goes up, so does the other.

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COLUMBIA, MD -

What’s written below did not come from me, but instead from my little brother. I’ve had a busy May and haven’t really had the inspiration to write, not because I’m feeling particularly lazy, which I am, but because there just hasn’t been much happening. So I’m letting my brother take over for me this month. It will give me a chance to think of something spectacular for June and as a bonus, you guys will get a chance to meet my absolutely wonderful, poignant, and hilarious brother, Andrew.

Just don’t give him too much credit - his head will get too big to fit through his front door.

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COLUMBIA, MARYLAND -

There’s something in my eye.

Well, technically, there’s something in both of my eyes and the very attractive optician I go to tells me they’re called contacts and that eventually I’ll get used to them, but for now I prefer to think of them as being something in my eyes.

That’s right…I got contacts. Insert the surprised gasp of all my friends and family [here].

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COLUMBIA, MD -

Dear Generic Online Dating Site,

While ruminating on my single status, I tempted fate and examined one of your websites. I perused the gallery of eligible men. I even went so far as to fill out a questionnaire and wait with bated breath while your “Romance Experts” (and yes, the air quotes are definitely implied there) tallied my results and told me my most likely matches were a man who lives in his mother’s basement but is “seriously working on moving up to the second floor” and a goat farmer who misspelled the word “goat” in his profile narrative.

(Seriously, it’s a four letter word. How does one misspell a four letter word? How?!) 

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SARANAC LAKE, NY -

It’s Friday afternoon by the time my plane lands in Albany.

It was supposed to be Friday morning, but Southwest has planes with phobias about flying that come from Florida to Baltimore and I inevitably wait an extra hour each time I fly north.

I’ve gotten used to it, unfortunately.

The nice man at the Enterprise kiosk asks me if I need a map as he hands me my receipt and I smile slightly, knowingly, and tell him that no, I know my way around.

These are old stomping grounds, this Albany area and the towns just north and to the east of it.

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COLUMBIA, MD -

It’s been cold now for about a week, the temperatures rising and falling with the sun’s own progression. Maryland may be a southern state, but it clings to a northern weather pattern and for that I’m grateful. I don’t think that I could live somewhere that the seasons were not accompanied by obvious changes, a place that doesn’t have the changing leaves of fall or the snowy gray skies of winter. I think it would confuse me, that I would wake up one morning and wonder where I was, who I was.

I don’t know if it arrived with the cold or with the departure of my mom after a four day visit, but there’s been an unusual sense of melancholy in the air since Monday. (more…)

NEW HAMPSHIRE -

Dear Groveton,

I’m sorry we didn’t get along…

* * *

I grew up 300 miles north of Boston, in a small town on the banks of the Connecticut and Amonoosuc Rivers in northern New Hampshire. To paint a picture that will explain just how far north this tiny town is, consider the farthest point north you know of in New England and then add about seventy-five miles to it.

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NORTHFIELD, VT -

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it? - Eleanor Roosevelt

I was barely 20 when the 9/11 attacks happened. It was a bright fall day in the peaceful town of Northfield, Vermont on a military college campus 300 or so miles north of the Big Apple, and I wasn’t even awake when the first plane hit.

I didn’t have class until 10…I had at least another hour before I had to be awake and I was using the opportunity to sleep in, especially because my thesis work would begin in another week or so and sleep would be a thing of the past.

My mom called me that morning and even through the fogginess of exhaustion I could tell that something was off in her voice, that something terrible had happened.

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COLUMBIA, MD -

I’m barely through the door when the miniature ball of energy that Jilly calls a dog meets me with pointed ears and a wiggling nub of a tail. I often wonder, when he greets me this way, if he isn’t confused by who I am, if all the dark hair in this house allows him to greet us all happily and to then distinguish between us by who returns his affections with as much glee as he gives them.

I am not one to return almost anyone’s affections, much less a fourteen pound Rat Terrier with a Napoleon complex…but it’s nice to know he loves me even though I’m his aunt and not his biggest fan. It gives me hope.

Jilly is in the kitchen and when I round the corner, my black bag hanging from my arm and Duke running circles around me with the hope I’ll drop something edible, she turns to face me with the refrigerator door open and two long neck bottles in either hand.

‘Sam Adams Cherry Wheat or Stoudt’s Belgian Ale?’

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COLUMBIA, MD -

Two years ago, on a whim, I responded to an ad on Craigslist for writers. I don’t even remember the letter I sent to Brad Listi, the fearless leader of this literary experiment, but I know that it made me laugh when I was writing it and it must have interested him because he responded.

The rest, they say, is history and today is my second anniversary with The Nervous Breakdown. It’s the cotton anniversary, which means that on this particularly dreary and humid day in the psuedo-south, I’m going to go out and buy myself something nice and comfortable and made of cotton (thank god it isn’t the wool anniversary or I think I’d cry).

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THE FUTURE -

Dear You,

If all goes well and according to plan, you (that would be me) should receive this long lost letter on your 37th birthday, ten years after I (that would be you) sent it. It’s 2008 here at the moment, June to be exact. You will turn 27 in close to three months. Exciting, I know.

It’s been a rough year so far, not in terms of terminal illnesses or deaths or deep and beleaguered sadness, but tough in the sense that the life you had planned for yourself all those years earlier isn’t exactly panning out the way you had thought it would. For one thing, your wardrobe isn’t at all what you’d envisioned it to be…so that’s mildly depressing.

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COLUMBIA, MD -

The trip north from Maryland to upstate New York can take anywhere from six to nine hours…it all depends upon your final destination and how many horrible drivers you’re forced to share the road with.

I leave Columbia in the middle of a biblical flood on Friday morning, bright and early as the clock strikes 6:30, and I head north on the back way to the Adirondacks.

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COLUMBIA, MD -

It’s spring and the Earth is green and for the first time in what seems like forever I can feel it moving beneath my feet again.

We went from barren limbs, to blossoming branches, to glorious green canopies in only a few short weeks. I know this because my allergies have finally tapered off and I can breathe without worrying that my lungs are going to collapse from the weight of the pollen in the air.

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COLUMBIA, MD -

The following isn’t a true story, mind you, but an approximation of things that could happen.

It’s a postcard sent from an imaginary Vegas, a few lines written on the back of a colorful photo that tell the bare bones of a story you’ve convinced yourself you won’t truly share with others.

They make you take the oath at the airport, make you promise that what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas….imaginary or not.

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THE SKYLINE -

Like most days in New England, the weather can’t decide what it would like to do.

There’s been rain and sun and wind and periods of all three combined - and that’s just within the last hour.

I’ve been here in New Hampshire since Wednesday evening visiting college friends and now, on Sunday evening, after a great lunch with my parents and my brother, I’m heading home to Maryland and to work in the morning.

It should be illegal to put St. Patrick’s Day on a Monday…someone (ahem…Mr. President) should really consider making it a federal holiday.

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PARKVILLE/BALTIMORE, MARYLAND -

“So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.” - Alice in Wonderland

Being a pin-up model was a little like falling down the rabbit hole.

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PARKVILLE/BALTIMORE, MARYLAND -

Atomic Cheesecake Studios is in Parkville, on the outer edge of Baltimore, and as we crest the hill that will take us to Stacey’s house, I suddenly wonder if we drove through a wrinkle in time and came out in 1959.

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COLUMBIA, MARYLAND -

This story actually starts in August, just after my birthday.

It starts with Jessica’s birthday present, something Jilly had been buzzing about for almost a month.

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