This is a public service announcement.

I am still at home with nothing to do except for making coffee, listening to music, photographing flowers, walking through unbuilt housing developments, working full time, watching baking shows with my parents, and desperately awaiting the end of a global pandemic that certainly hasn't been used as an excuse to further disenfranchise precarious workers while quietly abolishing regulations and restrictions and ethics for billionaires. As someone with a grand sense of perspective, I can only assume that my current plans for this blog are at the forefront of your thinking...

Planned Upcoming Content

I have a few series of posts in progress at the moment. One is a condensed version of some Turkey-specific travel information I started writing up not that long after I left Tokat. I hope that you'll find my out-of-date impressions of overnight bus trips enlightening and engaging.

Another is the story of how I moved to New York City, from the vantage of having recently left it. I started writing about this in a post previously, and I swear my writing will get only more energetic as I plug my airbnb affiliate link while criticizing their customer support.

Lastly but not leastly, I'm writing a nice humble brag about this one time I travelled for work and wound up forced to do laundry a bunch of times before I came home. Also, I spent some time in an ugly city with a pretty church. Why? You'll have to read and find out!

Beyond those topics, please do let me know if there's something I should write about. I set this blog up primarily for discussing travel, while pretending the title is a catch-all pertinent to all topics. Since I'm not able to travel currently, I would like to write about something else.

If you want to do the hard work of brainstorming (a.k.a. if you want to think up my topics for me), feel free. You can reach me by sending an email to literally ANYTHING at this domain name. Pretty cool, huh?

Site Redesign

I think I've figured out how "Cascading Style Sheets" work. If I'm right, I'll be darned if I keep this website looking quite the way it does. I have a refresh in progress, and my main to-do is to make sure it scales okay to screens of different sizes, and also to make sure it isn't wretched and broken. Believe me, I am setting the bar high when it comes to the design of this website.

I'm not sure when this will blip into existence, but for the sake of making an arbitrary deadline, let's say June or sooner.

I cough into my shoulder.
I sneeze into my shoulder.
I watch as the dates marked on my calendar
for something exciting
pass me by.

I'm thankful that I celebrated my
birthday just before people started
taking COVID-19 seriously,
so I got to hear the sound of Miguel Zenon's sax,
taste a last frozen margherita,
and blast... R.E.M. one last time.

[Note: please forgive any kinks with the photo hosting here. I'm trying to switch to hosting images in git lfs instead of just having a bunch of binaries checked into git, and it was a bit of a snag for the initial setup. Subsequent posts shouldn't be affected.]

Latte with impressive cat art. Bogota, Sept. 2017

On one particular March morning I rolled out of bed in South Brooklyn, and I have to be honest, I think I had a slight headache.

What was the cause of this ailment? Was it COVID-19, or the glass of whiskey I had last night?

Actually, I think it was caffiene withdrawl. Definitely, caffiene withdrawl.

Luckily, the cure was at hand, despite self-quarantine. I only had three pounds of coffee and no one to drink it with. Things were gonna be fine.

A beautifully presented c coffee alongside Greek pastries, somewhere on Gökçeada. April 2016.

So, Coffee

Sometimes, the distance between being a novice about something, and becoming something of a snob about it is a relatively short road. I believe I transitioned from stirring instant coffee granules in a cup of cold milk with a fork to doing fancy pourover with a scale in... about a year's time. Is this an improvement? My palate seems to think so... Well, there's less weird chemicals at least.

My headache-addled state this morning is ironic, because I avoided drinking coffee for quite a long time.

In my childhood, I looked down on people who required their caffiene dose in order to start their day, becoming dependent on a substance that offered no escape from rote daily routine. However, I did really like the smell of coffee.

I avoided drinking coffee (whilst being quite partial to tea) until I was three-quarters of the way through undergrad.

I started with the most ritualistic gateway drug of all.

View from Brighton Beach B/Q Platform, January 2019

This site seeks to answer one question and one question alone: "Where is Steve?"

The answer: I'm in New York City.

So, how did I come to this place, what are my thoughts and feelings about it? How long can I continue to tease thus? To answer these questions, I henceforth christen this the first in a series of posts tentatively entitled "NYC Days." And get started we will!

As Coronavirus rears its ugly head, I thought it would be important for me to finally get around to focusing on the important things in life. By which, I of course meant the Eurovision 2020 song competition.

For those of you not in the know, Eurovision is a song competition designed to help foster a sense of "European Community." Each country sends one artist to perform one song, and people in each country get to vote on which of the other countries' songs they most preferred.

The songs vary in quality and style, but they can basically be described as pop, mainly dance pop (yay!) or ballads (eh!). (Oh, look, I'm outting my prejudices right here.)

Perhaps one of the most prominent artists that Eurovision can really be thanked for bringing to widespread attention is ABBA. So good on them for that...

So without any further ado, here are my thougts on all entrants.