Escape Room reviews do not give me enough details-they're always like "I had so much fun! Yadda yadda yadda" without any substance, so I'm starting my own.
1. I used to think lock-based escape rooms were the problem, but the locks aren't the problem-it's the linear story lines associated with the locks. The best escape rooms are ones where you can solve multiple puzzles at once not knowing where they lead.
Check back for more reviews once I think of them.
1. Are pedophiles
I once had a man tell me he liked that I looked twelve.
2. “can’t” cook
The fast food industry thrives on single men.
3. Are secretly gay
They prefer the company of other men.
4. Have an addiction
Gambling, sports, alcohol, weed, meat, video games, sex, etc.
5. Are incompetent
They can’t do anything on their own.
"Not all men but somehow always a man"
With COVID restrictions lifted and a stable job finally at my helm, I started traveling again: first locally in Virginia, then to further destinations like California and Florida. Here’s how these different cities or areas rank.
1. Roanoke, Virginia
Home is where the heart is. Roanoke is the perfect combination of big time city and small town feel. Although my religious beliefs do not align with those who live here, I can’t say that I’m bored in this city.
2. NOVA/DC I don’t want to live in NOVA, but I always have a good time when I return. There’s always something new to try, and I’m never disappointed by the vegan food at Loving Hut. I also really enjoyed my biscuit sandwiches from Preservation Biscuit Company and the Oreo cupcake at the Bakeshop next door during my most recent trip to Falls Church. Each individual city in NOVA is a vacation on its own.
3. Blacksburg, Virginia
As a UVA grad, this is heresy to say, but Blacksburg is a much more enjoyable city to visit as an adult than Charlottesville is. The drive on 81 is scenic, and once you’re in the city, you don’t have to deal with the traffic that Charlottesville has. Located less than an hour from Roanoke, Blacksburg fills in what Roanoke is missing: a tried and true boba shop (Kung Fu Tea), a larger international market (Oasis), authentic Chinese food (Spicity), and an eyebrow threader that doesn’t have bad reviews (Best Eyebrows Threading).
4. Charlotte, North Carolina
I went to Charlotte for a Jesse McCartney concert at The Fillmore, and it was a very easy experience. I thought parking and the post-concert traffic would be a pain, but I easily found parking next to the venue at VBGB Beer Hall and Garden. The signs say you have to make a purchase to get your parking validated, but I walked around the restaurant and stumbled upon the QR code to validate my parking without buying anything. I was able to freely use their bathroom and read my book in my car while waiting for the concert to start. After the concert, I waited for traffic to die down before leaving, and it did not take long at all-10 minutes max-and when I left, it was a straight shot to my Airbnb: I dealt with absolutely no traffic. The highway to Charlotte is a different story, but getting around the city was very easy. I went to Ma Ma Wok for delicious vegan friend rice and BBQ drumsticks and Oh My Soul for an expensive but hydrating Guava Push. Ma Ma Wok had a parking lot, but Oh My Soul had very accessible and plenty of street parking in the quaint NoDa neighborhood, which I was able to walk around while waiting for Oh My Soul to open for dinner. While walking, I was able to enter The Happy Camper Lounge & Dispensary and purchase edibles for the first time. As a Virginia resident, that felt magical. This alone showed me that North Carolina was built different.
Fun Fact: My first time in Charlotte was a field trip to Carowinds where I didn’t ride any rides and sat with my middle school teachers the entire day because I had no friends!
5. Bethesda, Maryland
You could technically put Bethesda in the NOVA/DC category, but I wanted to shout it out because unlike all the other DMV cities, I had never been here before. I love walking around the Bethesda Row area and parking has never been an issue for me despite the lack of lots.
6. Greensboro, North Carolina
Greensboro would be higher on this list if Boba House, a vegan restaurant, hadn’t shut down. The pho at BaoBao Kitchen, despite having the same chef, just doesn’t hit the same, and while the vegan ribs banh mi is really good, it’s not enough for me to drive two hours for, but in combination with the Cinnaholic, it could be. Greensboro also has the next closest Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods after Charlottesville. It also has plenty of bubble tea options like Moshi Moshi.
7. Harrisonburg, Virginia
San Diego is kind of an outlier on this list in that I don’t really have strong opinions about this city other than that its Downtown is the whitest place I’ve ever visited-that is until I realized Roanoke was pretty white too. I’ve enjoyed my time here but don’t really long for it. I would definitely revisit family but wouldn’t go here on my own volition unless it was to Donna Jean for vegan pizza.
9. Pinellas County, Florida
I can see why people retire in Florida: winter does not exist here. I enjoyed shopping at Countryside Mall and eating at Lotus Vegan restaurant, but I hated the roads getting there. In Florida, if you make one wrong turn, whether it be a late or early turn, the only way back is a u-turn. Because there are beaches in Florida, I can’t say these areas are just roads like in Houston, but I did spend a lot of time driving around trying to get to places I wanted to go.
10a. San Francisco, California
San Francisco is a nice walkable city with many pretty sights, but the vegan food here was sooooooo mid to me. It is also a very white and white-adjacent (Asian) city devoid of any culture.
10b. Richmond, Virginia
All of the same problems I had with Richmond when I lived there still exist: it’s a big sprawling city with lack of public transportation from and to the suburbs, and there’s nothing to do in the suburbs. The food options are good, but is it really worth it to drive 20 minutes for a meal for one? If we could combine the walkability of San Francisco and the vegan food of Richmond, then we’d have the perfect city.
11. Charlottesville, Virginia
What is there to do here besides attend the University of Virginia? I hate Emmett/29-it’s so wide and congested, and the vegan options are so lacking for a big college town. I loved the vegan charcuterie at Botanical Fare, but it is no longer on the menu. Harrisonburg is the better stopping point for NOVA road trips and Greensboro the better Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods option.
12. Raleigh, North Carolina
Raleigh has four lane roads that lead to nowhere and a good vegan restaurant, The Fiction Kitchen, located in a very empty downtown.
13. Chesapeake, Virginia
There’s nothing in Chesapeake except the promise of Virginia Beach. I’ve had better frozen foods than the one restaurant I tried in Chesapeake, and there's no where decent to stop on the road here!
First, it was Chipotle, then it was a local bowl place. Next, a smaller, more local chain. Will my beloved Cava face the same fate? Can sweetgreen save them all or will fast casual salad and grain bowl restaurants die like the frozen yogurt fad before them? I won't be able to live if fast casual pizza restaurants like &pizza follow suit.
Never again:
On the bubble:
Still up for debate:
I don't buy milk tea anymore. 1. Because I can make it at home and 2. Because I can't trust these boba shops to make it vegan. So many of them come premade with non-dairy creamer, a misnomer, as it still contains casein, a protein derived from cow's milk.
My go-to order is now Passionfruit Green Tea, which I never understood the hype for because I had literally never eaten a passionfruit before, and my favorite or top bubble tea shop is Kung Fu Tea despite what my San Diego-born bubble tea snob cousins say. Kung Fu Tea is consistent, reliable, and widely available, in addition the other plusses I mentioned in my previous story.
Passionfruit Green Tea is passionfruit when you can't get passionfruit. It's refreshing with the perfect amount of caffeine, not too much to keep me awake, tartness, and sweetness, especially when combined with coconut nata jelly.
Tea house with actual good hojicha: Matcha Cafe Maiko
A reminder of how much work it takes to survive
When your meal prep runs out and you have nothing to eat
Your weekend job starts
Racking your brain for recipes and
Treading to the grocery store for groceries that cost way too much
Fridays
A reminder of how lonely you are
How you live thousands of miles away from friends who don’t have time to hang out with you anyways
A reminder that sitcoms lie
Fridays
A break from routine that shatters you
Fridays
An expectation of a reward for working 40 hours that never comes
I think I always knew that I was into girls or that I was at least a bit queer and not because I fell in love with my best friend or that I enjoyed the company of women more than I did men. I think I was queer in the way I lived my life in the media I consumed, the music I listened to and the women I found inspiring. I will not deny that I found women quite stunning and beautiful to watch and listen to; however, queer things such as parades and leaps in political actions also brought such life to me. I could not understand why a star like Whitney Houston would choose to stay married to a man despite knowing the freedom that came from being with a woman. I think I primarily associate my queerness and coming out to Whitney because she provided an avenue to this freedom. I didn’t want to be like her, closeted and unable to live freely.
Euphoria and out-of-body experiences where I would oscillate between intense joy and discontent at the things I was doing characterized my teenage years, and I could not quite pinpoint why navigating this world felt so hard. If anything good came out of the harrowing lockdown that was 2020, it was the ability to sit with my thoughts and grief, an ability to understand that my ineptitude to fit in this world was not in my lack of trying. Growing up different in a churchy and homophobic society limited my ability to express my queerness, and stifling my queerness allowed me to mask my neurodivergence because if I could hide this fundamental part of me, what was a little quirks and ticks.
I realized I had ADHD when people on Twitter would describe their symptoms, and I would relate to each one of them. My neurodivergent journey began with this discovery and was then followed by the revelation that my autism masked my ADHD. This overlap between my autistic and ADHD self made it almost impossible for anyone to see my internal struggles and battles. While my ADHD makes it impossible to keep time, my autism and empathy cannot make people late; therefore I always keep time. My autism does not allow me to be messy, but my ADHD can never allow me to be a neat freak; therefore living alone has proved quite challenging, as my space constantly rotates between messy and clean. However, the most prominent dichotomy was my ADHD could never establish schedules, but once I found a routine, my autism allowed me to stick to this routine.
I cannot express how freeing both my self-diagnosis and official diagnosis was. I could finally understand why simple tasks like taking care of my hygiene were harrowing. Why I could not hold down a simple job, why I could obsessively consume media, and why I picked up and dropped hobbies on a whim. It helped me realise that there was inherently nothing wrong with me. The world was not built to accommodate the needs of those at the margins. This freed my desire to be like everyone else. I stopped seeking the centre and found a way to live and thrive in the margins. I embraced my masculinity all while honoring my femininity. I stopped applying for corporate jobs and found my niche online, all while thriving in openly queer spaces.
This discovery while freeing was also deeply unsettling, I didn’t know how to exist without masking. Feeling and knowing you are different is acutely different from knowing why you are different. It made me sad, anxious, and at times I felt out of control. I yearned to explain to my peers how it was like to be in my head: the constant chaos, the overwhelming stimuli, the inability to focus on the mundane, and the crashing feeling that what one is doing is never enough. Many like to believe autism, ADHD or other neurodivergent traits make people geniuses. While I admit there are moments where my neurodivergence has opened up a world that neurotypicality would have limited, being neurodivergent is more than simply being smart. It is an inability to prioritize deeply important things like hygiene, work deadlines, a desire to escape a loud world, and a reckless indulgence to quiet the inner turmoil and anxiety.
This is not a coming out post, but I don’t want the straights to claim me; neither is it a self-diagnosis. My official diagnosis took a lot in me and is a story for another day. I wanted to rant about how someone should have seen how much I was struggling. They should have noticed how restless and anxious I was. They should have told me my queerness was not a burden, nor was my existence outside the binary but this bigoted world. Living in the margins so long, I was so misunderstood I didn’t care to explain any more, but I felt I owed it to this milestone to try and embrace my neurodivergence and my queerness, to not feel shame around my ineptitude to navigate this world that was neither created for me nor cater to my needs, and to be able to withstand and thrive within the margins without seeking the center. Twenty five years is a long time to exist in spaces that haven’t wanted me, or wanted to know me without masking. Those who will read this and know me will wonder if I was masking around them. Yes I was, there has never been a time in my life when I wasn’t anxious or depressed or just struggling.
This is an unburdening of shame that I have been carrying for too long–shame that is not mine to bear. My thoughts are still too many. I am still typically “lazy.” My follow through sucks, and I will probably always prefer the comfort of women even when I hate all humans, but now I feel no shame. My mind is less foggy. This is to not masking and to acknowledging and loving the whole package—faulty or otherwise.
I have been sitting with myself longer than I ever have, and my thoughts have finally raced and caught up, so this is me coming to myself. This me deserves a lot more compassion than I was given or that I gave others. This is to the me that couldn’t stop daydreaming in class, to the me that couldn’t stop picking up new hobbies and dropping them, the me that enjoyed and loved women but didn’t know it was an attraction, and the me that fell in love with my straight friend, the straightest of people.