Mexico City, which has the partially-destroyed Aztec Templo Mayor in the dead center of the city, a giant statue of Cuahatemoc on Avenida Reforma, streets and neighborhoods named after Aztec princes, fighters, heroes of the 19th Century Mexican Revolution, screams defiance of colonialism and imperialism.
Read MoreChinese Food Is Part Of My Identity
Staten Island is known for its excellent take out restaurants. Specifically Italian food and Chinese food restaurants are a level of tasty one or two notches higher than the same take out in Manhattan. I'm sure the other boroughs do justice to these ethnic foods. My personal experience is with the Staten Island version and the Manhattan version. Luckily, after five weeks in Malaysia, I can officially say I'm intimately familiar with the Malaysian version!
Read MoreScantron Pencil Erasures
I had originally drafted this as part of the Letters To My Teachers series, but upon completion I realized that this lesson does not belong in the same category as the teachers who really inspired me. This teacher helped me accept mental illness as a reality; that we are surrounded by mentally ill people and sometimes they have power over us …
Read MoreMy Mexico Manifesto
This essay consists of my overall thoughts on today’s Mexico. I write this after spending almost two entire months traveling through out the country starting in Tulum, south to Bacalar, making my way across the Yucatan peninsula (Coba, Playa del Carmen, Isla Holbox, Valladolid, Merida, Celestun, Progresso), flying to Tabasco to get to Chiapas, winding my way through the jungle and mountains, flying to Oaxaca City and then to the beaches of Oaxaca, making a pitstop in Mexico City, touring the supposedly dangerous state of Michoacan, up to Guadalajara, then to el norte to Monterrey, back down south to the center of the country to Guanajuato, San Miguel de Allende, Queretaro and finally back to Mexico City.
Read MoreGetting Better on week 3
Sometimes I think I'm getting better, even though I'm only on my third week of travel. I've let go of a lot in the past month. I accept the loss of my job and the decision to let go of my apartment and put all of my belongs in a 100 sq ft storage unit. I've created a new reality for myself. At the same time, I think it is really premature to say that after only two weeks of traveling, that I've gotten significantly better. What I can say definitively is that I feel some layers of the onion sort of peeling away and I also am getting a much better sense at what elements of my personality are just really what they are: me…
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