Bernadette Anat

I know there’s no lunging involved in this particular instance.
I just have to document what happened tonight.

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I write this wrapped in a hotel-issued pseudo-kimono in our effing tiny (aka, NYC-regulation sized) room in Tokyo, belly full of Ippudo ramen, head ringing with “Irashaemasaaaaaae!”‘s. My mommy is snoring, so I’ll try to keep this one short. 

Some highlights, ka?

Wat Pho: Temple of the Reclining Freakin’ Buddha | Bangkok
This is me offending a nation with my thigh. Foreal, though: I’ve only ever been struck mute by a work of art a couple o’ times. One of those was, for some reason, Botticelli’s Madonna of the Pomegranate—I don’t know, man, the tears just happened. Another was this. I’m lunging, but I’m really losing my shet.

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Amphawa Floating Market | Bangkok
This is me and Uncle Au (prounced “Ooh.” Foreals.) lunging ‘NSync before boarding our longtail speedboat of Ecstacy. Uncle Au took us to all the hot Buddha spots in Bangkok, then over to the amazing Amphawa Floating Market. Traveler’s Tip: That tourist-trappy morning floating market is old & busted; the night market is where the party’s at (canal-side karaoke?!). I had mussels so good that I felt funny, new things in my pants. Those funny feelings came back with the 45-minute boat ride to & from the market, zooming through canal villages; on the way back, it was pitch dark and we stopped every few yards to firefly-gaze. I’m gonna go ahead and say it was one of the more magical nights of mi vida.

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Asiatique at the Riverfront, Calypso Show | Bangkok
This is me doing you a favor, because I like you and I feel bad that you’re reading this.
Skip the drag shows. Skip all of the drag shows. Have your friends dress in drag next time they come over to drink, and spend this extra night in Bangkok with someone like Uncle Au. Besides, men who were that good at being women only made me feel bad at how I’m HORRIBLE at being a woman, and I was BORN this way.

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Brick Bar, Khao San Road | Bangkok
This is me finally showing Bangkok w’sup. So, Khao San Road is to Bangkok as The Strip is to Las Vegas. All of the backpackers, all of the Singha tanktops, all of the white kids slurping down alcohol buckets, ALL OF THE TIME – throw in your odd lady-hawking-scorpion-pops and dude-trying-to-tattoo-you. But this hidden basement bar – danke, Lonely Planet – was clearly where all the Thai kids went to escape our obnoxious asses. Live band playing SICK T-Pop, locals bopping around suuuuper happily… This is what young America could be, if we weren’t so angry all the time?

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Mommy Realness, Khao San Road | Bangkok
This is my mommy tryna show me up. Not sure if I’ve been clear enough about this, but this trip is a mama/daughtah affair; my mom and I travel together a bunch. But this time, I’m learning a lot about the differences between us, travel-wise — my mom, the bougie queen, loves to be taken places, served, shown around, toured. I love to strip down, take the bus, ask no one for directions and basically act like we’re studying abroad. This has mostly resulted in me taking us the really, really long way to a medium-level tourist trap where my mom agrees to buy everyone’s everything. YOU’RE WELCOME, TOURISM BOARDS.

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Siam Nirawit | Bangkok
This is me getting RUDELY interrupted by a goddamn elephant. I had run out of pickles to feed her and Kyle (that’s what I call her) got sassy in the middle of my lunge. But you guys, she had these gigantic brown eyes and curly eyelashes and she looked at me — like, into my soul — and in that moment, she whispered into my being the secrets of this world and worlds beyond.
…Then a Japanese tourist shoved me aside and I cried. Bangkok, am I rite?

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Overall, Bangkok was incredible, but not for the easily tired or easily confused. Vacationing in Asia puts you (and by you, I mean Google) to werk. You have to work for the hidden gems, crawl and hike for the non-campy goods. But it is sho’ nuff worth it, especially with a delightful co-pilot like my momz. I’ve made it a point to grill her thoroughly about her twentysomething days (& caught some on video!), and with that, this trip has become so much more than sightseein’. The bonding would make you vom. 

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It’s like that incredible blockbuster, “Crossroads” with Britney Spears, where her and two friends… Nevermind, I won’t do that to you, I’m so sorry. 
Tokyo, take ya pants off, we’re here!

If you’re on Instagrizzle, continue to follow along @heyberna / #eatpraylunge!

Greetings! So, okay. Here’s what the hell is going on with me: 

• Last Friday was my last day as Executive Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief of Seventeen magazine.
• I don’t technically start my new job – Teen Camp Director at the YMCA of Greater New York — until June. 
• So I’m taking a few weeks off to reset. And by reset, I mean Eat, Play & Lunge my way through Bangkok, Tokyo, Honolulu – all with my mama; hate on, haters – & my hometown o’ San Francisco. (I don’t know, man; I lunge when I get excited. It’s my spirit gesture.)

Hence, my friends: #EatPlayLunge! 

(For all you non-twentysomething-females, it’s a play on Eat Pray Love GET WITH IT GOD KAREN YOU’RE SO STUPID)

Turns out my travelin’ mama is really into taking naps, so I’m gonna try to updizzle when I have the chance (and the wifi). Ready?

Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok, Thailand | Squish-kneed Torture Chamber
This is me showing you the kinds of leg exercises I did up & down the main cabin during our ten (Ten. Like… actual, ten) hour flight. It’s fine, guys—I passed the time reading 73% of the Lonely Planet Bangkok guide on my Kindle, like a real-life twenty-something douchebaguette.

Bangkok Marriot Sukhumvit | Our Bathroom, You Guize, GROW UP
This is me giving my mom panic sweats in our so-new-it’s-terrifying hotel room. Everything smells like Ikea packaging! Shoutout to Lonely Planet—thanks to their weird tips, I knew to steer my mom away from airport limo scams & into a metered taxi, saving us about 1000 Baht! …Which is basically a Mocha Frap in US dollars.
Sssssso.

Chatuchak Market | I Am Sweat, Sweat Is Me
This is me making the locals giggle in the world’s sweatiest sweat market where they sell dreams and sweat. On the way, we befriended a group of study abroad students from Michigan (you guys, my mom and I can befriend fire hydrants.), and they took to calling my mom “Mom.” You can imagine the locals’ confusion, what with various tall, blonde kids shouting “Mom! MOM!” at us every few yards. #America

Sukhumvit, Bangkok | I Don’t Know, Man, The Concierge Said It Was Chill
This is me doing an interpretive dance to the Thai Gods after going IN on some local street cart fare, begging them to not bestow upon us The Runs. Our bodies are already so confused after our 4-hour afternoon nap. You guys, look how my hair is eating that Thai man. This place is NUTS. 

Y’all, the locals we’ve encountered are so… namaste. In NYC, everyone wears their struggle right on their face; on the NYC subway, every car has its Crier, its Visibly Agitated, its Belligerent and Questionably Smelly. But ’twasn’t an irritable face to be found in Bangkok’s ridiculously-user-friendly skyrail. Everyone’s chill. Everyone’s polite. Everyone’s friggin’ behaved. 
It was THE WORST. (No, it was friggin’ lovely.)

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I feel insanely lucky, and also sweaty, overstimulated and meaningful-gazey. Stay tuned, chai ka?
(If you’re on Instagrizzle, follow me @heyberna & #eatplaylunge!)

Hi! It’s past my bedtime, I’m blogging because YOLO, and I have a question.

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Is love the most important thing in the world because I think about it all the time,
or do I think about it all the time because it’s the most important thing in the world?

(IT’S ABOUT TO GET REAL THOUGHTCATALOG IN THIS JOINT)

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I mean, not, like, boys, exclusively. Just the whole damn gamut of it, anything that makes your insides dance without needing (immediate) medical attention. No matter how much I try to Most-Well-Rounded myself, how aggressively I try to negotiate my brain into namaste, my mind drifts to that sticky, warm place. Never-ending tab at the Love… Lounge. It always dips into analyzing what’s lacking, what’s possible, what’s real, ~*~*wHaT i WaNt*~*~ — even if truly nothing new is happening in any of those sectors. My brain shakes the sometimes-empty can like maracas anyway, desperate to make some noise, feel something. I turn it off by writing something very blunt to myself. Honesty usually shuts me right up. Blame it on the plethora of couch confessions taking place at 5C these days, forealsies, but is there anything more important than lurve?

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Humor me. It’s a Monday night and I’m feeling verrie Carrie.

Yes, but brown

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Dude, straight up: My brain has morphed into this whole other creature that I think me-circa-2010 wouldn’t recognize. Back then, I was all career, all the time, and I never imagined myself in any other mindset. I was—I am—an expert networker and really effing good at it. My only concern was climbing higher, growing my mentor roster, trying to be everyone’s first person that comes to mind for every opportunity possible.

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And now, I’ve let go of that and other things have taken over. My mental lineup has changed. I think about love all fecking day long, all kinds of love, every kind. I think about strangers, and how the shit relationships even happen; I think about how really, really effing weird humans are and sometimes I wonder if there’s a higher life form out there LOLing at how effing weird we are, to people we love and people we are afraid to know. I think about honesty. A lot. I think about the way my bones are growing, the morals I’m filling them with, and the ones that seem to just seep in on their own. I wonder what I won’t be able to change, if I’ll ever want to, if I’ll regret the way the cast is setting now. I think about the people and circumstances raising me here; I think about how lucky I am.

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Here is a photo of me thinking.

Yes, but shaven

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And I think about how, for the first time since god knows when, I feel free from whatever bound me to be so career driven, so high on hollow achievement. I feel like I could live my life, big or small, without anxiety as to how I’m “leaving my legacy” or “making moves.” I broke up with a dream during these past two years (no we’re cool its fine we get drinks), and instead of chasing, the way I’ve always done, I think I’m standing still. Being quiet. Holding out my arms and stretching out my palms and seeing what passes through me, what slides into my fingerwebs, unprompted. I’ve never been this still in my life. This shh.

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And that’s a weird mothereffing thing to do in this city.

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But I think I’ve earned the ssh.

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(This egregiously quarter-lifey vomit puddle brought to you by my last week at Seventeen,
and all of its accompanying feels.
… I know, right? I’ll explain soon, I phromise.)

This Fourth of July, I did this.

And lot of weird things happened while we did this that I think can be applied generously—using two fingers, a circular rubbing motion and adult supervision—to life.

Are you ready for me to turn this into one big nauseating twenty-something analogepiphany?!
(Analogy + epiphany = Deal with it)
OF COURSE YOU ARE. It’s why ya came!
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On the left is my workwife; in the middle is her roommate; on the right, under the hair, me.

Ignore John’s titillating unamusement.
Did you guys hear that? The people? The comments?

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It’s 1:17am, and nobody should be awake right now.
But a year ago today, I was, and I remember almost everything about it.

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