After seven years at the Mysterious Workplace, you are allowed to take a sabbatical, which is three months of paid time off. Not many people achieve this milestone and some of us are such workaholics that we put off our sabbaticals for years, or we don't manage to take them at all. One of the lawyers made no less than three separate attempts at ( Read more... )

Rio is a party town. It's beaches and tourists and don't-look-at-the-favelas. Rio is not a place where anyone works, presumably because all of the work in Brazil is done in the considerably less picturesque city of Sao Paolo. There are 18 million people in Sao Paolo, living in a sort of endless maze of high-rise buildings--downtown without end. Sao ( Read more... )

I'm not going to lie to you, my largely theoretical readers--I have suspected for quite some time that being Carmen San Diego is not good for me. For a long time, I thought that I had bigger problems. My eye exploded. J and I spent most of a very stressful year gutting and remodeling Bunker 3. Then I traveled. And I traveled. And I traveled. In ( Read more... )

I don't have a subconscious. I have dreams like a hammer to the skull ( Read more... )

I enjoy dressing up. I enjoy it a lot. So when the Mysterious Workplace learned that we had been given an award, based partially on my work, I was pleased to be part of the two-person crew tasked with attending the black tie dinner and awards ceremony. "I am forgoing both bustle and corset," I announced as my co-worker made arrangements to rent a ( Read more... )

Last week Carmen San Diego was in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, for a two-day event organized by the State Department to help activists and journalists find ways in which to report on corruption, violence, and crime. Violence is in plentiful supply in Tegucigalpa. Honduras is currently the murder capital of the world and its capital, Tegucigalpa, is not ( Read more... )

I've become one of those people who takes pictures with my phone when I travel and posts those pictures to social media sites. This is a problem because now I take photos instead of composing witty blog posts in my head. I fear that I will get out of the habit of writing because I am too busy taking panoramic shots of the Jardim Botânico ( Read more... )

E says that I only write when I am sick. She is right. I have a cold that I am profoundly afraid is going to turn into Death Cough, and so I blog. The whole summer went by without any writing. Let it be known that since June, I have done the following things ( Read more... )

The trouble with writing for a living is that I rarely have the time to write for fun. For the past month, my life has gone sadly undocumented, and as the number of things I have not written about (SXSW, the Stormkern show, the Hubba Hubba Revue's Goth show, last week's aerial act, protecting activists from pro-Syrian-government malware) piles up, ( Read more... )

As Carmen San Diego, I don’t do television. I am a funny-looking creature with odd mannerisms and a fanciful dress sense. I have had to turn down television appearances because I was wearing a dress with a pattern that would moiré and I didn’t have time to go home and change. I spend a lot of time talking to print journalists, which I enjoy except ( Read more... )