Click here to read my first piece as a reporter at Fortune in the Global 500 issue (July 21, 2008). It’s a photo essay about four women (of the more than 30 who participated) from our Most Powerful Women summit who mentored women from developing countries–including India, Zimbabwe, Peru and Jordan–as part of the FORTUNE-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. (Disclaimer: it takes about 15 seconds to download).

Click here to read a story I wrote about the new Siebel Varsity Golf Training Complex at Stanford University. The practice facility includes six greens, each of which incorporates the trademark style of an iconic course architect, giving Stanford players a leg up at the courses on their rota designed by these masters.

I recently read a piece in the NY Observer that essentially said it doesn’t matter if your story makes the cover of a magazine if no one talks about it.

Nothing seems to live for more than a day without commentary; the contemporary version of “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound” is “if an article gets written and no one blogs it, does anyone care?”

I was therefore somewhat relieved to stumble on this mention of my Gold Country story on the NY Post’s site.

Prior to my move to Manhattan, the subway ranked high among the “amenities” I looked forward to enjoying as an NYC resident. I had lived in three cities with sub-par public transit systems and was eagerly anticipating leaving my wheels in California along with car payments, insurance, registration, permits, tickets, parking, and the constant fear that my car would be broken into or vandalized. I love to drive, but I think anyone would agree that owning a car in a city is a challenge.

Even with its myriad headaches—snotty passengers, infrequent trains, steamy summer mornings underground—the subway has not let me down. There is a learning curve, but like the rest of Manhattan, it’s accompanied by no small sense of pride. In fact once you get it figured out, navigating the subway system with relative ease is the ultimate sign that you belong.

The subway is truly a separate world, geographically and psychologically. Ever since I started this blog I’ve wanted to create a category of posts about the fascinating and bizarre things I’ve witnessed underground.

I’ve seen couples taking engagement photos, a guy carrying a car fender and kindergartners on a field trip. There have been scenes frightening and moving–a social worker reunited with a man who had been in her care; a family struggling with a mom who had had too much to drink; a young woman who believed in love at first sight on the platform; and of course the arguments, crying, and people in pain.

On top of this are the subway “regulars”: people selling batteries, candy or counterfeit DVDs; those asking for money or preaching a message; bewildered tourists from Europe or the midwest; and the entertainers, from Sunday morning men’s gospel groups to mariachi bands to drum circles.

The subway is a slice of New York life; the pinnacle of people-watching; the place where we can truly catch a glimpse into the life of others. Every passenger has a story.

While I’m often content to observe and imagine, sometimes I can’t help but engage with my fellow passengers, as happened this past Wednesday morning on the Brooklyn-bound B train heading into midtown.

Soon after boarding I noticed a smartly-dressed woman carrying what looked like a large, thin iPod in a camel-colored leather case.

“Is that a Kindle?” I asked her. I’d noticed more reading these electronic devices on the subway, but I wasn’t sure how to tell one from another.

“It’s actually a Sony Reader,” she said in a tone that I interpreted to mean she was open to conversation.

“Do you like it? What kinds of material do you read on it?”

“Well, actually I’m a book editor so I load all my submissions on it. Since most of them end up in the slush pile, it saves a lot of paper.” I had never considered this as a possible application for the digital reader but suddenly it seemed as if this could have been its inspiration.

We discussed the merits of the Reader and its ease of use. Apparently Word documents work better than PDFs because you can adjust the size of the type. The book editor bid me goodbye at Rockefeller Center–fittingly since it is the heart of the publishing world. I was left to ponder the future of the written word as I went off to my job as a print journalist, feeling hopeful about a technology that could drastically reduce our need for paper and the resulting waste. The irony is not lost on me.

Apparently I’m not the only one with digital readers on the brain. On Sunday the NY Times had something to add to the conversation, and last month the NY Observer considered their future role in the media.

If you have one of these readers, I’d love to hear what you think. If you don’t, what’s been holding you back? What do you think about their future role in our lives? Will they replace books, newspapers, magazines?

I expect this subject to crop up again in future posts, in addition to further accounts of life on the subway.

My blog is so backlogged I hardly know where to begin. Below are a few posts you can expect to see in the next week as I try to play catch up:

• The long lost chronicles of my trip to Argentina
• A recap of Step Up’s “View from the Top” panel
• New York City escapades including a shoe odyssey and Julie & Jess’ excellent Russian adventure
• Lunch with John Hayes, Chief Marketing Officer of American Express Company

Pardon the non-sequitur, but I’m kicking it all off with a “recipe.”

My dad is one of the most talented cooks I know and he has always said that the sign of a true culinary maven is someone who can make a meal out of whatever is at hand (Iron Chef-style). My dad can look inside the refrigerator and see five different meals. So yesterday I picked up a few things at a local farmers’ market near Lincoln Center–among them a bag of hearty spinach and a little onion (I also bought a loaf of the Meredith’s Bread from Kingston, NY and splurged on some lilacs from a farm in Garrison, NY, about sixty miles north on the Hudson).

When I got home I grabbed some Trader Joe’s sun-dried tomato chicken sausages out of the freezer to thaw and pondered my evening meal. How could I incorporate my fresh ingredients with what I already had? Sure, I know there are websites where you can type in your ingredients and they will spit out a recipe, but that seemed like cheating. I wanted to put my skills to the test.

At dinnertime, I cut up the onion and two of the sausages and sauteed them in olive oil. I also boiled some whole wheat penne. When the onions and sausages were nearly done, I added the spinach and let it wilt, then mixed it in with the pasta. It was delicious, healthy, quick and easy. Plus I had managed to make just the right amount for one person, which is a challenge with many recipes.

The total calorie count came in around 850 (depending how liberal you are with the olive oil) with only 8 grams of saturated fat (4 grams from the sausage & 4 grams from the oil).

Two sausages (110 calories each)

Two 3/4 cup servings of whole wheat penne (210 calories each). Note: Try to undercook the pasta if possible to achieve a lower glycemic index.

Two tablespoon olive oil (120 calories each)

Spinach & onion (I didn’t bother counting these–they’re veggies!). Note: I think you could substitute broccoli rabe, kale, chard or any other hearty, leafy vegetable with equally tasty results.

If you decide to try this, let me know what you think. Or post your favorite healthy meal-for-one below!

Click here to read my cover story about golf in California Gold Country.

Click here to read a story I wrote for The Blue Doors, the alumnae magazine for the Nightingale-Bamford School, a girls’ school on the Upper East Side in NYC. The piece is about three young alumnae who climbed the Matterhorn in July, 2006.

Last weekend I went to California to visit my parents. I told my friends and coworkers in New York that I was going “home.” Later, when it was time to return to New York, I again announced that it was time to go “home.” This is the perfect allegory for a dilemma many of us twentysomethings face. Where exactly is home? Is it the place you grew up and subsequently left behind with childhood? Does it cease to exist except in our memories? Or is it the place we currently inhabit, makeshift and transitory as it may be? It’s also possible that “home” is somewhere out there in the future, when we finally decide to stick somewhere and buy expensive furniture. Maybe it’s all of these.

Upon returning to New York–going from seventy degrees to snow!–I sent an IM to a colleague that I was feeling homesick. He asked if it was for people, places or the sun and it was hard to say. Then he told me what he remembered from his first few years in New York. Here it is, as written in Instant Messenger, like an ee cummings poem:

I remember going around saying to myself
newyorkisterrificsoexciting
justwhereIneedtobenewyorknewyork
Then I would flip and say screw this dump

I told him this is what I miss: having a cup of coffee with my granny in the morning; riding in my dad’s shiny red Cobra; getting a manicure with my mom; picking oranges from the tree in my parents garden and gobbling them down after a bike ride through the hills of the Peninsula. Perhaps most of all I missed clean air, open space and being able to walk down the sidewalk without having to dodge people, garbage and dog poop (despite its virtues, even the UWS can be a minefield). I rarely complain about NYC living–what purpose does it serve? The city has treasures all its own. But it’s always a bit of an adjustment coming back.

My colleague explained it like this:

what happens is, you are you
wherever you roam
but…
some places you get more You infused into you. like a refueling of self.
and some place you actually leak a bit of You out.

Melancholy as it is, this uncertainty about where to call home is also full of possibility. I’ve been flipping through Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and in her essay called “Composting” she writes of the importance of perspective:

“It takes a while for our experience to sift through our consciousness. It is hard to write about a city we just moved to; it’s not yet in our body. We don’t know our new home, even if we can drive to the drugstore without getting lost. We have not lived through three winters there or seen the ducks leave in fall and return to the lakes in spring. Hemingway wrote about Michigan while sitting in a cafe in Paris. ‘Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.’”

This makes sense to me. Living in New York I’m not sure I know it well enough to write about it, or more importantly to write what it has meant to me. But I can write about the other places I have called home. I can write about California, and about Seattle, and especially about Montana, a place which, perhaps because it is so very different from this one, resurfaces now with utmost clarity.

I recently attended a basketball game at the YMCA.

The contest featured twelve-, thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls. Despite the fact that most of them are in the midst of the biggest transition their bodies will ever make, none seemed the least bit physically self-conscious as they dribbled, passed, and shot the ball. It reminded me why sports are so important for women. Our bodies are constantly being objectified, but when we play sports we forget all that and transform into powerful instruments of athleticism.

On a lighter note, the game also reminded me of my first job in college as an intramural referee. My sister had been an IM ref in college and it seemed like a good idea. So when I saw an advertisement in UCLA’s Daily Bruin  for indoor soccer referees, I applied. I had played soccer for twelve years growing up and knew most of the rules. When I heard back from the recreation department, they said they had filled all the spots for soccer, but would I consider refereeing women’s basketball?

I had never played or watched basketball apart from attending a few games in high school. I understood the idea, but it never interested me. Plus the rules always seemed so fuzzy and byzantine. “No thanks. I’m not interested,” I said.

Apparently they were desperate because despite my explanation of the above, my new bosses convinced me I’d catch on and that I’d always be assigned a more experienced partner to officiate with. I was basically there to time the games and ensure everyone’s safety. I thought that last part was a joke.

I was given a black-and-white striped polyester jersey, a whistle, and a manual on the rules of basketball. I attended an orientation clinic and assumed my place on the schedule. However, there was a lot of new terminology including something called the “key” and a confusing set of circumstances relating to free-throws. By the evening of my first game I wasn’t sure how I was going to remember everything, so I just decided to try to be fair and project confidence.

It was an admirable goal but not easily accomplished. And as the season progressed, I didn’t seem to be getting any better. After one game in particular I sprinted back to my dorm, noting that several of the female players didn’t exactly agree with my calls. At the year-end banquet my bosses gave me an award: “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.”

Anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t give up easily, but I hung up my jersey and whistle. I may not have learned much about basketball but the experience did offer other valuable lessons. Follow my instincts. Resist persuasion born of desperation. And finally, accept that some things are over my head. Like when they throw the ball from outside the key, it counts for three points, right?

I do not exactly fit the demographic of an Upper West Side New Yorker. I am neither married, nor do I have children. I am not an Orthodox Jew. I do not collect Social Security. And yet I feel completely at home living just west of Central Park in this community.

It’s difficult for other New Yorkers my age–particularly “downtowners“–to hide their disdain when I tell them where I live. Some of them try, saying things like “That’s okay.” Others simply ask outright, “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get run over by a stroller?”

I try not to act defensive but I certainly have my defense ready, starting with the fact that I’m from California and I need green space close at hand. I spend a lot of time in the park walking, running, riding my bike and it relieves a lot of the stress that city living imposes. Then there is the fact that I have access to three subway lines. And I  admit unapologetically that I like the quiet, safe neighborhood feel with tree-lined streets and smaller buildings.

Finally, although I rarely share this bit of trivia for fear of appearing mawkish, I am also somewhat enchanted by the idea that I’m surrounded by other writers and by a literary legacy dating back to the days when Edgar Allen Poe lived only blocks away.

Above all I pride myself on rising above the fray of what it means to be cool in New York City. I am too cool to be “too cool.” I won’t be hemmed in by stereotypes.

However.

A week ago I had a few experiences that seemed to reveal why others are so dismayed by my current geographical identity.

I got up on Saturday morning to go to a Pilates mat class at my gym on Broadway at 92nd Street–the heart of the UWS. I belong to Equinox, which I consider to be a fairly hip place as far as gyms go. The interior reminds me a little bit of how the W Hotel might design a gym–sleek and minimalist. Although I’d never been to one at this gym, I’ve attended Pilates classes before, and they are usually filled with women across a range of ages. No surprises.

But on this day as I gathered outside the “studio” where the class was to be held, I noticed that apart from one other girl my age, I was the youngest person by twenty-five years. I was surrounded by male and female intellectual types attired in leotards, spandex, and glasses with funky frames. They were chatting about topical matters with collegiality. These were their peeps–not mine.

That afternoon I attended a film at a theater that shows non-mainstream/indie films. Although the theater was more on the Upper East Side than Upper West, I again noticed that I was in the midst of another generation. Several of the moviegoers were wearing special headsets to help them hear better. A persnickety woman in the row behind me had the audacity to make me promise that no one was going to sit in the seat next to me. She didn’t like anyone sitting in front of her.

I started to wonder if by living on the UWS, I was now completely off-track, displaced from my own peer group and unable to ever sync-up again. I discovered evidence supporting this theory when I attended the SOHO Equinox on the following Monday. It was as if someone had pressed fast forward seven years on my college gym. This is more like it, I thought. I left the gym to get my hair cut and colored at a hip nearby salon. All was not lost.

And yet despite the revelations of late I remain content living where I do. After all, I consider it an honor to be stamped with one of these cliches: “you’re a mature twenty-seven,” “an old soul,” “wise beyond your years.”

But still, sometimes I need a break from the UWS and from this “older” persona. This past weekend I stayed at the home of some family friends in Connecticut, keeping an eye on their teenage kids. I spent Saturday night with three eighth-grade girls making ice cream sandwiches and singing Karaoke until I was hoarse. They weren’t part of my generation–and I was nowhere near downtown–but they reminded me of the importance of another, very different cliche–young at heart.