My Greatest Adventure

(This is the first in a month-long series of blog posts from National Safety Council survivor advocates. We are sharing our stories in honor of National Distracted Driving Awareness Month.)

I’d chosen my sublet on Craig’s List, and it ended up being a fuchsia-colored living-room-turned-bedroom in a garden apartment on a corner in Little India. After I’d met my future landlady, a Filipina flamenco dancer from Las Vegas, and my sometimes roommate, a flamenco dancer from Mexico who liked to clap when making a point, I walked back on the street I’d used to get there, smelling unusual spoiled lychee smells. The rows of yellow-gold necklaces and filigreed chandelier earrings glistened in the store windows as I passed. The ultra-white mannequins in purple and teal saris in a storefront, their whiteness made all the more jarring because of where they stood. And I thought, Now this is an adventure! Or probably something like that.

Read More
My Fight Songs: Tunes for the Longest Long Run I've Ever Done, the New York City Marathon

If a runner's playlist says a lot about her, a marathon runner's playlist says awhole lot.

I mean that literally—there are 83 songs on this bad boy.

I've known people who could get through a marathon listening to one Lady Gaga song on repeat. I know runners who prefer purely instrumental. My sister-in-law and fiancé like to run to the stylings of AC/DC and Henry Rollins, respectively. For some people, nothing can get them moving like a good, hard yell.

I myself like to guide my list by what part of the race I'm in at any given time (and I also have a penchant for male falsettos and badass female rappers). 

Here is the compilation I've gradually built over the past two years. It's what will keep me company as I push myself through all five boroughs of New York on foot, trying to reach Central Park in less than five hours. Trying to reach Central Park at all, God willing.

If this list and I part ways I will be lost. OK, so I'm being dramatic.

No, really, I won't know what to do.

Enjoy!

Read More