| |  Illustration by Jade Schulz | I’m gonna start this piece the way I start most days: by blaming my mother. Well, first I’ll list some of the things she excelled at: protecting us from harm, explaining adult concepts in ways that didn’t terrify her children, organizing treasure hunts in and around our home, pretending her hand was a pet alligator named Ally, and defending us at parent-teacher conferences (you haven’t lived ’til your mom has told your middle-school theater teacher she has “no sense of true art”). She taught me the concept of a mental-health day in second grade. She made every weeknight an act of rebellion and every weekend a safari through the city, and the only people she ever got angrier at than us were those who didn’t recognize what she believed, despite any clear evidence, was our Mensa-level genius. “Average intelligence my ass!” she screamed as she ripped up my lengthy ADHD-testing report. She picked the chicest items in the Delia’s warehouse-sale catalog and the best nail polishes from Wet n Wild, and she modified McDonald’s orders so they had “more flavor, less filler.” She let me wear her sweaters as dresses. I may have been the last to lose my virginity, but I was the first to have pink hair. She was Cher in Clueless and Cher in Mermaids. She was magic. This is all, of course, a lead-up to what she DIDN’T do: sit through school plays, listen when we read our poetry aloud, get off the phone, ever, or cook. She didn’t cook. She will fight this assertion like a Long Island–bred samurai. She will say “I slaved over a hot stove just like my Russian grandmother!” She will remind me of the Chez Panisse cookbook that sat behind the answering machine, and she will ask, “Were you ever hungry? No, no you were not, because I COOKED.” But her definition of cooking is wildly skewed, and therefore so is mine. Defrosting a hamburger patty for my father to pan-fry? Cooking. Frozen tortellini? I mean, if you talk on the phone then suddenly realize the water is boiling over in a blaze of expletives, it’s al dente! And, the worst offender of all, a snack of raw cauliflower paired with a cup of mayonnaise with cumin in it. (Even she can’t defend that one.) I never judged her for it. Instead, I became obsessed with takeout. The joy of picking your variant of Chinese chicken, the luxurious reveal of the congealed contents of the carton. To this day, though I’ve had some beautifully appointed, home-cooked meals by caring and immaculate friends, nothing can match the thrill of a plastic bag of possibility. In my twenties, it was easy to excuse the constant ordering. I lived alone, worked bananas hours, and often forgot to take my jeans off to sleep. For a brief but terrifying time, I even took to ordering a muffin and placing it by my bedside for the morning (cereal + milk = manual labor). The circumstances of my life, combined with a penchant for using processed food as a sedative (that’s another article), meant takeout was my religion. I could have anything I wanted without speaking to anyone. Summer rolls AND a hamburger? I’ll take it all, like some willful child dictator sitting upon a throne of wrappers and receipts. But as I started to spend time in more adult homes, it was becoming clear this was not the norm. I had been busy declaring home cooks to be people with random time on their hands while I comforted myself picturing working families picking up a bag from Boston Market. But it turns out that some of the world’s busiest people — people raising kids on their own while holding down two jobs —were finding time to shop for and make their own food, an approach that is altogether more sensible, not to mention affordable. And if they could do it, what was my excuse? After all, Jenni — someone whose career I have a pretty solid sense of cuz, you know, it’s a shared career — not only cooks for her children nightly but also cooks TO RELAX. With this new awareness, my own appetites felt excessive, almost immoral. It was one thing to be starving. It was quite another to be so fucking lazy about it. Add to that a desire to have a family and a cursory glance at the Science section of the Times (added sugar is murdering me slowly?), and you’ve got yourself a conundrum. We all know home cooking and shared meals are age-old ways to bond and unite our clans. We also know that by cooking you can control what’s being put in your food and your children’s food. The first tenet of many diets is “Start preparing your own lunches!” Why don’t you start preparing my grave? But when I can no longer use my busyness as an excuse (we’re all pretty busy), how do I explain away my non-desire to prepare healthful meals? The same way I’m learning to explain so much to myself: I just don’t want to. The thrill of a sizzling pan? Lost on me. Pinches of spice? Far too restrained. Raw meat? I can’t. For many years I didn’t consider “I just don’t want to” a valid excuse. And for many things (hearing your friend out after a misunderstanding, helping make our world a better place), it really isn’t. But our goal, as actualized adults, is to lean toward the things we are passionate about and to spread joy using our specific skill set. For example, I benefit daily from my own thrifty creativity, my excellent taste in weirdos, my ability to handle blood, vomit, and even the unspeakable third substance, and my passion for essential, overlooked media. My theoretical children will have janky but spirited theme parties and an array of radical aunts and uncles, and I won’t barf when they barf. They’ll know about Gidget and Moesha and the soundtrack to Tick Tick Boom, the Jonathan Larson musical that predated Rent. I’ll write poems for their lunch boxes every day, even if lunch is a sandwich we pick up in a Lyft (oh, yeah, I can’t drive either). I’ll keep them healthy with the age-old battle cry of Jewish American Princesses everywhere: “Dressing on the side.” However, I admit I may need to know how to at least turn on a stove. My thirteen-year-old goddaughter, eating pizza in my living room and using her uncanny knack for zeroing in on adult insecurities, told me that I at least “have to learn about pasta, for an emergency.” This was after she led me, as confused and sweaty as I could be at Pure Barre, down the aisles of our local supermarket. “OK,” I conceded, because I will concede anything to her. And Jenni says a quesadilla is as easy as making toast (she’s going on the assumption I’ve made toast, but fine). But the beautifully roasted chickens and home-whipped cream will have to happen at THEIR godmother’s house. And I like fantasizing about it, my currently imaginary children and I going to Pakistan Tea House with all the cab drivers changing shifts at 4:30 p.m. to grab the $5.99 vegetarian special. They’ll get really into the little bags of nuts by the register at Starbucks. I’ll say “Nothing like a street hot dog” as I fish around for cash and they wait expectantly. Maybe their friends will tease them about their lunches, like I was teased for having a buttered roll, an apple, and my own hot dog in a plastic bag. No one will want to trade. They can take it. I did. Of course, fantasies are just that. I’m ready to get my ass handed to me by angry children. It’s gonna be for something, right? I’d rather it be for my meals than my politics. Lord help me if it’s both. Ironically, it was when my sibling and I left the house that my mother began cooking in earnest. Just recently, I saw an Instagram in which one of her friends thanked her “for the delicious homegrown-tomato salad!” Who is this freak with a ladle, and what did she do with my mother? Nothing if not surprising, my mother has recycled the time we once occupied testing the limits of her fantasy life and is now learning to make meals for the people she loves. The betrayal stings, but not as much as the burn I got the one time I tried to make lasagna. No apologies. I inherited my appetites and am almost ready to pass them on. Lena Dunham loves to make her delivery person feel seen and loved. | | | | |  Illustration by Kristen Liu Wong | It all started with a CD. The CD sat on the top shelf, the shelf I was not to touch, in the room I was not allowed to wander into unless I heard the exact words Come in. Even the dog was not exempt from this rule. To be granted permission to enter meant a sneak peek at the world of teenhood. Permission meant I could fumble through her fine-tipped sharpies, poke at her dried-up watercolors, and smell the strange tang of her oil paints. Permission meant I could run my hands nervously across her collection of Anne Rice hardcovers and peer at the depictions of vampires and witches. Permission meant I could admire, even if I couldn’t touch, her latest electronic gadgets and, of course, her CDs. The album, my sister Christina explained to me while waving it slowly in front of my face, was explicit. My new word for the day. “See this?” she said, pointing with a pencil to ensure my Coke-bottle-sized spectacles were focused in the right direction. “This also says parental advisory.” I gasped. I knew that one. That was one step below the coveted “close your eyes and hold your ears” rated-R. “Yes,” she said gravely, knowing she had reached a new level of cool. “You have to have parental permission to listen to this.” I solemnly nodded, already frantically compiling the list of chores I would tell my father I would complete in exchange. “Permission,” she interrupted, brow raised, “you won’t get, because this is explicit.” I blinked heavily. “But you get to listen to it?” “You aren’t allowed to listen to it because one listen,” she hissed, “will scare the pants right off of you! You’ll never listen to a CD again!” I gasped. “Maybe even never sleep!” she added, an afterthought. Later that day, I found myself hiding under the desk, trembling with the knowledge of having broken three rules. I wiped sweat from my brow, tasked the dog with sitting in front of the cracked door as lookout (he got to peruse Christina’s trash can at the same time), and plugged her headphones in. I promptly scared myself silly with the screaming vocals, the screech of guitars that sounded utterly mad, and the pound of drums that sounded like death. It took me weeks to work up the courage to touch her CD player again. Weeks before I could even think about sneaking it, let alone that particular CD. Weeks to come to terms with what I had heard. Anger. Violence. RAGE. Emotion in its rawest form. It terrified me. I LOVED IT. *** Christina has always been a bit mysterious. Being four years older certainly helped to make everything she did seem otherworldly. She had a knack for teaching herself new things. How to draw. How to play the violin. To me, she was limitless. I was (and still am) in awe of her. Yet whatever she did, I did. I insisted on it. I looked at her and saw myself reflected. It became more important as I got older that she was the mirror to which I asked not who’s the fairest but “Am I strange?” We spent the majority of our childhood in a small Midwestern town. Small enough that it was commonplace to see a tractor and a car on the same road. Small enough that we played in sewer drains with flashlights and climbed weeping willows. Small enough that I expected to be one of the only black girls in all my classes. They noticed first. Mamas will always tell you nothing is wrong with you. Sisters, however, tell the truth. Her glasses were my glasses. Her Apple Bottoms were mine. Her tight corkscrew kinks shot straight up like my own. At night, I watched her layer herself in the same shea and cocoa butter I used. So when they said I smelled funny, tugged incessantly at my hair until I was in tears, and asked how far the black went down on my skin, I looked to her. She was limitless. “Am I strange?” I would ask. “No,” she would say. “Just short.” I couldn’t feel like an outsider when I was with her. With her, we defined our own blackness, and we did not let ourselves be put into society’s boxes. So when we started to discover Midwestern rock, the lifeblood of any Midwestern town, we weren’t ashamed. For us, music was something you moved to, and it was tempo that moved us. How could we not love a genre that devotes itself to drumbeats? So what if we head-bang booty-shaked! How could we not love a genre that brought back the seven-minute song? We threw our hands up and howled along with everyone else. We screamed and released the rages of the day, the week, the month. We came home from shows feeling an inner peace that settled into our bones, leaving us ready to face the world again. Our parents looked on, bemused by how we could listen to Underoath and Beyoncé back to back. As soon as they understood it wasn’t Devil music, they didn’t care what we listened to. They did, however, put their foot down at our wearing all black. So my sister and I consoled ourselves with the fact that music doesn’t care what you are wearing, and we promptly showed up in pink shirts to concerts where everyone sported black leather jackets on top of black pants. “We’re black already,” we said, and strutted. *** Fast-forward ten years, and there I was, open-mouthed and staring once again. The air smelled of half-spent beer and sweat. Every now and then some restless eye would catch a hold of us and blink in surprise before nervously skittering off again. The darkness that usually cloaked us at shows had been broken by all the stage lights, which suddenly illuminated the room. “Oh. My. God!” my sister screamed, frantically backing us up. “They are going to do it!!! They are going to do the Wall of Death!!!” “Wall of what?!” I gasped, dodging elbows and the surging crowd. “Get back!” she yelled, then helped me. Perks of having a tall sister: she can grab you and place you behind her. Downsides of having a tall sister: she can grab you. “They haven’t done this since they got kicked out of Vans Warped Tour!” she yelled over the fray. I peered around her hip to see the crowd melting away. They left a clear line, and at the very head of it, Beau Bokan, lead singer of Blessthefall, towered over it. He stood at the front of the stage as if he were about to conduct the mightiest orchestra this world had ever seen. On the left, the crowd swarmed, buzzing and hungry. On the right, it swayed and curdled in on itself. Ready and waiting. “The what?!” I gasped again. “Wall of Death!!!!!!!” she screamed. “One!” shouted Bokan. The crowd PULSED. Ready. I was terrified. “Two!” My heart kept beat with the slowly moaning drum. The hum of words unsaid. Breathless. “Three!” Two waves crashing together. A lightning strike from both ends. The clang of a bell while you whisper. Two sides became one. Reformed. PULSING. Emotion in its rawest form. I grabbed a cement pole with my left arm and hooked my fingers in my sister’s belt with my right. I held on for dear life against the waves of people literally crashing into each other. Their chests colliding, elbows flying, and bodies bouncing off of each other. I held on tight and tighter still, fighting the tug and pull of arms not my own as the charging, broiling mass swallowed us whole. We were in the middle of the crowd, and it wasn’t clear if we would ever make it out. I was terrified. I LOVED IT. My sister grinned. I grinned back. Courtney Long is an African American metalhead in her twenties and co-editor of #BLKGRLSWURLD Zine. When not head-bang booty-shaking, she can be found holed up in the nearest chocolate shop. | | | | |  Illustration by Jesse Zhang | Staring at my phone. Why won’t my fingers dial 9-1-1? Do it, Katie, fucking call! I hear myself shouting in my own head. I lose my chance. I’m covered in glass. My knuckles are bleeding. Now I am screaming. I climb out my passenger-side door and instinctively touch my face. Blood. How hurt am I? I can’t feel anything. “Katie, I am so sorry,” he says. The metal shovel he broke my car window with now out of his hands, he follows me inside, trying to stop me along the way. “Please, Katie, please, I’m sorry,” he pleads. Get out of my way. I must see how hurt I am. I walk into the bathroom and look in the mirror. There are lines of blood coming down my face, but I can tell nothing is deep. I’m wearing glasses and a knit hat, which thankfully protected my eyes from the glass that had just been launched into my face. I stare at myself blankly in the mirror as I begin to dab at the blood. My heart is pounding, and I barely recognize myself. The blood-streaked reflection keeps looking at me, but who is she? How did I get here? He tries to take over at dabbing the blood off my face. I tell him to get the fuck away from me, and I look at my phone once again. Must call for help. How can I call with him standing there? I text my dad, “Please come get me.” Then he takes my phone away. Fuck. *** This is how my marriage ended. I’m 30 and divorced. I’m educated, and I live what most would describe as a comfortable, middle-class, white-privileged life. Yet I experienced domestic violence for years. My marriage ended when my husband assaulted me and was arrested two days after Christmas. Upon his arrest, a full order of protection went into place. This meant he could not contact me for (at least) six months, or he’d be charged with a felony. We’d been married for two months. That night, one cop asked how a “woman like me” could find herself with a “guy like that.” Were there really “no signs of behavior like this?” they asked. Of course there were signs. I hurt deeply with feelings that I had “known better,” that I had “seen this coming.” Though I was the victim of a crime, finding forgiveness for myself would prove to be the most challenging part of recovering. *** Our first date was the best first date I had ever had. He was sweet and generous. We were vulnerable. We talked for hours. I gushed over it to friends, and I came back to the feelings it brought out in me many times when things got bad. At one point during that first date, he got up, walked over to my side of the table, and kissed me. Because he liked something I said THAT much. At 25, I was more familiar with men treating me poorly than otherwise. But here I had a handsome Midwestern gentleman who could cook, sing, and dance, and he looked at me in a way I had never experienced. Finally! Wading through the sea of douchebags had led me to him. It was all very romantic. I didn’t realize until I was out of the relationship that verbal and emotional abuse is domestic violence. The way he hurled insults at me during a disagreement, how he’d use his physical size to intimidate or block me from walking away, how nothing was ever his fault, how scared he could make me feel, how powerless. “You’re a bitch, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.” “What happened to the sexy, confident girl I fell in love with?” “Nothing is ever good enough for you.” “You’re a cunt.” “This is all your fault.” I couldn’t communicate openly and honestly with him for fear of how he might react. I held things in and always felt baseline annoyed with him. This is how abuse can become a true mind fuck. The victim (hate that word) of abuse struggles to accept/name the actions of a person they love as abusive. You love them and therefore want to believe in them — even when they’re doing everything they can to control you. He consistently played into my insecurities, using things I told him in confidence against me. He would tell me I was manipulative. That I was never happy. By the end of a fight, I felt dizzy and exhausted. I no longer knew what it was about, and I just wanted to move on. *** Through the help of a domestic-violence counselor, I was able to assign terms to what happened to me over nearly five years, such as gaslighting and traumatic bonding. It took some time to truly accept what had happened as abuse. “He’s an alcoholic,” I’d say. “Not all alcoholics are abusive,” my counselor would retort. “I hear he was diagnosed as bipolar,” I’d add. “He didn’t abuse you because he’s bipolar” was the reply. She stressed to me that I had nothing to feel bad about. She gave me handouts about red flags in dating, and I checked off all the boxes as I reflected on my relationship with him. We talked about how fucked up our culture is, both in how we treat domestic-violence survivors and in how we demonize abusers (if we acknowledge them at all). I began to see the world with new eyes, and it was shocking. In June, our divorce was official. Thankfully, we didn’t have kids or shared assets, and I have a wonderful support system. Getting out of my abusive relationship was much easier for me than it is for many people. But it wasn’t that easy. I was not able to annul the marriage. The requirements for this are completely outdated, and physical violence doesn’t qualify you. Unless you can prove you’re related, that one or both of you was intoxicated when you were wed, or that one of you is insane, you’re shit out of luck. Though I was unemployed at the time of the divorce, I didn’t qualify for any financial support. A divorce, without lawyers, simply to file, is just shy of $400. On the day of the divorce, despite the order of protection, we both had to be present in court, mere feet from each other. Initially, I was pretty quiet about what had happened. Silence proved toxic. As my life progressed and I was about to open a business, I knew speaking up was the only option. I’m grateful that we are in a moment where more stories of abuse are being told and women are being believed, like when the former White House staff secretary’s two ex-wives, Colbie Holderness and Jennifer Willoughby, went public earlier this year with the violence they experienced. The only way to bring about change is to bring it all to light. When I posted about my experience, I received a huge response. “Likes” poured in, and women began reaching out to me — to thank me, to ask for advice, to tell me about their experiences, or to simply send love my way. I also pissed people off and became the topic of conversation at the local bar in my small town. Some thought I was brave, others vindictive. I felt empowered. Today, I own a yoga studio, and I’m launching an aromatherapy e-commerce business in 2018. I’m certified as a domestic-violence crisis counselor, and I volunteer at Women’s Support Services in Sharon, Connecticut. This year, their training had twelve participants. Previously, the largest volunteer training groups had just two or three participants. Change is coming. Our culture creates both abusers and victims, and when we realize that, we can prevent violence. Love shouldn’t hurt. Katie Shanley is a yoga teacher and holistic health coach. She is the owner of Buddhi Tribe yoga-and-wellness studio. You can learn more about her here. | | | | |  Illustration by Laura Breiling | I’m clinging to a five-story slice of granite outside of Bishop, California, and thinking I may have run out of options. My right leg bounces with fatigue, and blood is trickling down my hand. Whatever advice my climbing guide is calling out dissolves into the wind. Get her down, I imagine my crew below saying. She’s too old. I just turned 60, which I forget until moments like these when I’m hanging by my fingertips and wondering, Can I do this? I glance down. The answer better be yes. “Hey, where’d you come from?” I whisper to a seedling thriving absurdly in the rock. As I lean toward it, my left hand lands on a hold that wasn’t there a minute ago. The next move makes sense inside my muscles. I climb on. *** Over the years, I’ve braced for the steady decline of getting old as I hit an invented sell-by date. I thought I’d wake up every morning sad, with a body that barely worked. But here’s the catch: I've fallen crazy in love with knuckle-bruising adventure. And the surprise: I’m good. Like, really good. With muscles strong enough to kick my younger self’s ass. As a kid, I loved the idea of sports but had no language to express my desire. It’s hard to imagine the world pre–Title IX, but before it was signed into law, girls were not welcome on a playing field, period. No one even pretended to get girls’ sports organized and funded. The young women who did play field hockey and soccer and who were already good athletes had to fight to play. Other girls with athletic ambition went out for cheer squad. I wore glasses and was known for getting hit square in the face with a dodgeball. But then came a sports miracle: powder-puff football, a polite high-school affair where girls raised money for local charities by playing the game. Boys “coached,” and no one was supposed to be good. It was perfect. Suddenly, the thing I hated about myself — my big shoulders and muscular legs — had purpose. We were instructed to grab the plastic flag from our opponent’s waist to signify a tackle. At first, I barreled into other players because I couldn’t grab the flag and also stop in time. But then I kept barreling forward because I could. I suddenly, and unconditionally, loved how my muscles pushed off the line and drove my shoulder into my opponent’s belly. Even today, I can taste the emotional cocktail of fierceness, shame, and adrenaline I got when I plowed into the girl across from me and made her cry. We were reminded that this was to be a friendly game — fun for all — but I wanted more. I wore my bruises like some gone-wrong Girl Scout merit badge. I loved that feeling. So I set out to see how I could reignite it in a sport girls were allowed to play. After powder puff, there was my tennis phase, equipped with my mom’s Jack Kramer racket and a stack of “tennis made easy” library books. My boyfriend would smother me in advice until he got bored and wandered off to roughhouse with his buddies in the next court. Frankly, it was a relief. The boyfriend’s relentless critiquing made the sport more his than mine. I resented performing for him. And I missed the brute force of powder-puff football, where none of the guys cared enough to steal the sport from me. Next, I took up surfing. A friend gave me her brother’s banged-up surfboard, but I was too shy to ask how you stood up. I spent most of that summer just bobbing beyond the surf break. But that didn’t stop me from putting a surf rack on my beat-up red Opel Kadett sedan. I brandished bravado instead of skill, and my cockiness almost made me drown. Believing my own hype, I said yes to a big-swell surf trip, paddling out into serious waves with my guy friends, only to be mercilessly rag-dolled back to shore. Then came skiing. I sequestered myself on baby runs where I could pick my way down without being judged. When I fell onto a friend’s ski pole, skewering my lower abdomen, I refused to get treatment at the first-aid center because I knew the guys working there, and they were cute. My dad rushed me to the ER when I got home two hours later. After my twenties, I became monogamous to skiing. It was a true passion. When it all goes right, skiing is like standing on the hand of God. Everything falls away except your breath, the shift of your muscles, the crunch of snow. Off the mountain, it becomes shorthand for assessing moral character. Eventually, I learned how to drill bindings and got a job as a ski tech. At a local mountain, I offered kids’ lessons in exchange for free lift tickets. The success of any romantic relationship hung on one question: Can he ski? In my 30s, life blurred into a fast-forward tape — love, marriage, job, mortgage, graduate school, babies, new job, that argument, another Christmas, the flu, vacation, a mean boss, Dad dies, kids’ softball practice, grocery shopping. And just like that, it’s 25 years later, and I’m spit out on the other side of the sell-by date. *** I didn’t mean to crush on climbing. But when my daughter invited me to a yoga-and-climb day in the Santa Monica Mountains, I fell madly in love. The warm feel of rock against skin and the whiff of danger as I pressed up the route, chased by a velvety release of adrenaline — the experience is almost equivalent to really good sex. After the lesson, I drove straight to REI, bought one of everything, and then stopped at the local climbing gym to sign up for classes (then I had to go back to REI to exchange everything for what I really needed). I went home and binge-watched women climbers. I bought a pull-up bar. My husband built me a hang board. Now I’m all in. *** My mother says one of the unwelcome surprises of aging is that you become invisible. She’ll be waiting in a grocery line and someone will step right into her, then look confused. “Oh, I didn’t see you there.” She says she’s learned to make herself bigger in public places so others don’t mow her down. Climbing refuses to let you be invisible. You’re up on a wall, alone, and you can’t change the subject. “I’ll climb next,” I gingerly announce to my climbing partner and start to rope up. I stop myself from adding “I’m sorry.” I’ve promised myself I won’t apologize, but I’m only able to keep from saying it out loud. Inside my head, I’m thinking, I’m sorry for being new, for not knowing the secret climbing rules, for making mistakes. But once on the wall, one is obliged to own her truth: fear, doubt, embarrassment, exhilaration, and something impossible to savor in a well-curated life — surprise. The night before my first climb, I spent hours figuring out what to wear so I looked like I knew what I was doing. The next day, I remembered everything except my glasses, which meant once I swaggered to the wall, I couldn’t see well enough to tie my own knots. My daughter did it for me, using the same soft voice I had used when teaching her to tie her shoelaces. This is how it will be one day, her taking care of me, I thought as she cinched the knot tight on my harness, giving it an extra pull. After weeks of failing to reach a ridiculous hold, my arms suddenly connected with it, as if I’d always known how. Where did that come from? I wondered. How did I do that? My 60-year-old body still holds surprises. Which makes me think: What else could I do if I were able to stop silently asking permission? Or if I ignored what I thought I knew about what might happen next? Climbing has re-taught me that there is only right now. I may not have this strong body next week or next year, so I better get moving. I don’t have time to be shy or embarrassed or worry about what anyone else thinks. So I’ve taken up surfing again. And when I walk down the beach and it’s me and every seven-year-old boy in the neighborhood riding those tame waves, I laugh. Debra Hotaling climbs, skis, and surfs in Southern California. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine, and Hotaling was a regular commentator for the news radio program Marketplace. | | | | | | | | |
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