It isn’t really the holiday season until the Sweeney family piles into the car with a bunch of suitcases, a few canvases, and some gigantic frames for a minimum of six hours. My little sister is about to be seventeen, and we are not exactly a tiny family, so we get some real quality bonding […]

Of all the shit I have purchased since my arrival in Paris, the €20 coffee maker was probably the best. (In perhaps a bit of a contradiction, I would say that splurging on a nice duvet was probably the second best purchase.) I have very little to report on life in Paris because I spend […]

I remember sitting in my back yard with a bucket of chalk, long after the sun had set, drawing nonsensical things and trying to make jokes about my impending move. At 14, being told to leave LA for a small town in Missouri was roughly equivalent to my life coming to an end. My best […]

My phone rings and I know it’s my mom — she’s the only one who has my landline number, aside from the automated French recording that calls every so often. “Derrik was arrested in Cairo.” I didn’t know how to respond to that information. It was a short phone call — she wanted to make sure that I heard […]