I recently attended a professional conference in Louisville, Kentucky. I have not felt so uncomfortable around a group of people I theoretically have something in common with in my entire life! Well at least since I made the mistake of signing up for a free group trip to Israel back in 2009.

The big difference was, this time I realized that I wasn’t crazy to feel like everyone was judging me—they totally were. Conferences are like what Charles Darwin would invent for a high school project on survival of the ambitious, and his group members would be Becky Sharp, Attila the Hun, and a honey badger.

I decided to treat my time in the conference cooker as immersion therapy. All my worst fears about being evaluated and rejected by others were going to come true, and it was my job to get down with that. It was not the best experience of my life, but I learned some things for next time.

1. People will walk away from you in the middle of conversations. Try not to take this personally.

That is what networking is about. One woman I was chatting with about filing systems announced that she was going to go take a nap, and ten minutes later I saw her kicking back with a beer across the room. Of course that happened, because a) look what we were talking about and b) that’s what you’re supposed to do at a conference.

Sometimes I’d try heading off a prospective ditching by being the first one to bounce, and I also tried wildly inviting more people I didn’t know to join the conversation in order to keep the pressure off me in one-on-one scenarios. All these options went… weirdly, but that was fine!

When someone wanders away mid-sentence, it also helps to imagine that they are leaving to rescue an injured fawn, or deliver emergency pancakes to a team of orphaned kindergarten football players. It’s possible.

2. Dress appropriately. Everyone walks around staring at each other’s torsos like they’re trying to pick out the star-bellied Sneetches. Because: nametags.

If yours has a name with caché on it, you’re a star-belly, and people will happily chat with you while standing in line at the Hilton branch of Einstein’s Bagels. If not (raises hand), they will ask thoughtful questions like “So why are you here,” or else look wistfully past you as if they are looking for Mr. Darcy or someone else dreamy and important.

Sometimes I got tired of this and flipped my nametag around so that it was blank, which forced people to ask me what my name was and what company I worked for. It was sort of satisfying, but really it only delayed the inevitable for a few seconds.

3. You will be called on to explain yourself. Maybe have something ready to say.

This was the most awkward part of the conference for me. The successful networkers had well-developed elevator pitches that summed up their professional lives in a sentence or two. One very cool girl said that she’d spent her twenties “collecting stories” as an art student, seamstress, and carpenter before finding her way to her current career. Another guy had worked at the Federal Reserve. He said the day he quit to pursue his professional dreams, he ran out of the building, stripped off his coat and tie, and threw them in the garbage. I did not have a story beyond, “Me friendly, you too?” Will fix.

4. Make friends based not on who can clearly help you with your career, but instead based on whoever seems nice and fun.

It wasn’t a very Attila kind of move, but it made me much happier and more comfortable. And since people who I like and admire usually do things that I think are cool too, I don’t see how this approach could possibly hurt, professional development-wise.

5. Go off in a corner somewhere from time to time.

At conferences there’s a lot of pressure to be on 24/7 like a dutiful Roomba, but that’s not sustainable. When I felt overwhelmed’ I’d duck off to text people back home or step outside to grab a coffee. This helped me remember that I was a human being with a life that extended beyond windowless blocks of hotel conference rooms. Also, it turns out that sometimes when you’re just sitting by your self, people will actually approach you. (Nice change.)

6. Even if everyone is judging you (and they are!), lots of other people are feeling judged too.

At one workshop, I overheard a guy with gelled hair whispering frantically to the girl beside him. “I feel like everyone here hates me,” he said. “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable.”

“They don’t hate you,” the girl said with a reassuring head-tilt. The guy did not look convinced. But she was telling the truth. Conferences are not places of hate. They are places of vast, bottomless neurosis. Which means that when I attend my next conference later this month, I’ll saunter up to the registration table knowing that I fit right in.

Sarah Todd blogs about feminism and popular culture over at Girls Like Giants. Photo: NHSE

Where did your last hundo go, Sarah Todd?

$4.98, Rex Goliath sauvignon blanc I got this at my favorite wine shop, where there is a sweet elderly woman who always asks to see my ID. Then she notices that my driver’s license is from Ohio, and she tells me her son used to live there. We talk about this every time I see her. Tradition!

$4.16, Chai latte + tip This year, I adopted my friend’s weekend-only fancy coffee drink allowance, which has made writing in coffee shops feel way more luxurious. While I was drinking the chai, the man at the next table said he was my blood brother because we were both wearing Claddagh rings. We had a brief conversation about Ireland, and then I realized that he wasn’t going to stop talking to me, so I just started typing really fast even though all I was writing was “I hope he stops talking soon” over and over like Jack in The Shining.

$13.50, Movie ticket to Beautiful Creatures + plastic cup of pinot grigio A fine new film! Four stars, a teen paranormal romance Southern gothic camp triumph. Goes great with cup wine.

$23.75, iPod car charger, seltzer, and N.Y.C. Makeup blush in rose glow I was listening to the This American Life episode about Harper High School in the car and my iPod was about to die—I pulled over at a CVS and bought the charger so I wouldn’t have to wait to finish it.

$17, Pad see yew + split order of spring rolls + bottomless cups of green tea + tip Tofu never does that crispy, golden-brown cubed perfection thing when I make it at home. What is the secret?

$8, Cappuccino + chai + tip Friend + me.

$8, Grilled portobello-spinach-basil pesto sandwich Normally I eat out almost never, but that went out the window last week. Frugal February fatigue, maybe.

$16, Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed (indiebound // amazon) I was walking down the street trying to figure out what to do about two life-type matters, and I passed a bookstore, and I thought maybe Cheryl Strayed would tell me what to do and then I wouldn’t have to decide on my own. She is much wiser than I am. But none of the letters were about my two specific questions, which makes sense, because why would they be. It’s not a psychic book. It’s still tremendous, though.

Sarah Todd blogs about feminism and popular culture over at Girls Like Giants.

The day before I was scheduled to fly to Ireland, I was photocopying my passport and basking in the short-lived feeling of being a faintly together adult who takes basic precautions before embarking on international travel. Then I glanced down and realized that my passport had expired four months ago.

I felt like I’d just been slimed in my heart. I was hopelessly screwed.

Or was I? I decided to ask the Internet, which told me to ask the U.S. Hotline for International Travelers, where I reached an official who informed me that there was a loophole specifically meant for slackers and woolgatherers and hopers and prayers and magic-bean buyers. If I got in line early enough at the passport agency with the right materials in hand, and if I was willing to pay $170 dollars, a last-minute, do-or-die passport could be mine. 

Which is why I rolled out of bed at 5 a.m. on Dece. 31 and prepared to head to New York City’s U.S. Regional Passport Agency, one of 13 branches scattered throughout the states. The doors opened at 7:30 a.m. I wanted to be sure I would be toward the front of the line.

I zipped up my suitcase and did one last check to make sure I had everything I’d need at the passport office: Several sheets of 2 x 2 inch passport photos; a completed DS-82 form for passport renewal, filled out in careful black ink; my expired passport; and a copy of my flight itinerary to prove that I was not just a space cadet, but a desperate one.

By the time I got to a silent stretch of Hudson Street at 6 a.m., a few people were already waiting in line outside the passport agency. It was too dark, early and cold to do anything but try to distract one another. Soon we were swapping tales of travel disaster.

Laurie, a sophomore at Elon College, was waiting in line with her dad, a barrel-chested man with a handlebar mustache. She was scheduled to fly to Athens on Wednesday for a three-week study abroad program focusing on the economies in Greece and Turkey. But the last time she’d seen her passport was when she slipped it into the backseat pocket of her parents’ car, which appeared to double as a portal to another dimension.

Ben, dressed in a sporty windbreaker with gloves built into the sleeves, had wanted to keep his passport secret and safe. So he chose a location in his Manhattan apartment so secure that even he couldn’t find it again. His flight to visit family in New Zealand was in two days.

Behind me was a family on their way to Cancun: two exhausted parents shepherding a tiny boy and girl wearing matching pom-pom hats. The parents hadn’t realized that childrens’ passports expire every five years. They were turned back at the airport, and they’d already missed one flight. “It was an expensive mistake,” the father said.

There was a special, sheepish camaraderie in the early-morning line. We all understood that we’d messed up. Now, filled with humility, we were throwing ourselves on the mercy of the U.S. government. Ron Swanson would have completely hated us.

At about 6:30, a man in his late twenties wandered over. He was wearing a striped scarf and had an accent we’d later learn was from Panama. “Hey,” he said, “are you guys all waiting to get into the passport office?”

“Nah,” said Ben. “It’s just a cool place to hang out.”

We all cracked up, including the man in the scarf. He joined the back of the line.

I wasn’t the only person with a same-day flight. Jason, a New Jerseyite with an expired passport, had already missed one flight to the Caribbean. His rebooked plane left JFK at 12:40 in the afternoon, which he figured meant that he needed a new passport in hand by 9:30 a.m. He had a cab scheduled to wait for him back at his apartment.

“Everyone’s already written me off,” Jason said. “My boss was like, ‘See you at work on Wednesday!’ But I keep telling him, I won’t be there.”

As opening time neared, the line swelled and stretched to the end of the block. The man in the scarf took pictures with his iPhone. He asked Jason to save his place and ducked out to McDonald’s, returning with a thank-you coffee for Jason and extra hash browns for anyone who wanted them.

“Is it getting colder?” I asked Laurie and Ben, doing a two-step to warm up my feet.

“I think it’s just hope getting closer,” Laurie said.

Shortly before 7:30 a.m., a State Department official with a reassuring dad-like presence appeared to answer our questions and tell us what to expect inside. We would go through an airport-style security scanner, he told us; no food or beverages were allowed inside the building. I had a package of chestnuts and half a burrito with me for the flight. I gobbled down the burrito and stashed the chestnuts behind a nearby fire hydrant.

Past security, there were two lines: Line A, for people who had appointments, and Line B, for people who didn’t. Two women worked at the booths, taking about one person from Line B for every three or four people from Line A.

As long as our paperwork was in order and our plights sufficiently desperate, the women in the booths sent us to the tenth floor with a call number. Upstairs, I sat in a plastic chair and stared at the screen at the front of the room, willing my number to pop up. I watched Laurie and Ben get waved through and trot off with their passport issues resolved. The dad-like government official appeared again to tell the waiting crowd that we could pay for our expedited passports by cash, credit, or money order, but to save our counterfeit bills for McDonald’s. “We get at least one counterfeit bill a week” he said. “This is the worst possible place to try to pass one off. We’ve got detectors in the back.”

While I waited, I ran over the advice my friend Ryan had given me the night before. He was coaching me on the best way to ask people for help.

“Remember,” he said, “you’re asking them for a favor. So never suggest anything specific you want them to do for you. Just say, ‘Hey, I’m in a jam. Here’s the problem. Is there anything you can do to help?’ Most people want to be the good guy. But if you demand something, forget about it.”

Ryan was a wise man! But as it turned out, I didn’t need to use any persuasive tactics. When my number was finally called, I just handed over my folder. A quiet, smiling agent looked over my paperwork and ran my passport photos through a face-detection scanner. Then she handed me a claim number. “Your new passport will be ready for pick up after 12,” she said.

I could have hugged her, but there was a wall of glass between us. So instead I just handed over my debit card.

On my way out, I passed the father of the family heading to Cancun. “Did it all work out?” I asked. He said it had, and wished me luck. We shook hands. Then I passed Jason, who was looking pale.

“They say they’re expediting me right now,” he said. It was 9:35.

While I waited for my new passport, I hid out in Il Cantucco, a bakery in Little Italy that offers free samples of warm, salty bread shaped like grapevines. I sipped a glass of black coffee and thought about all the lessons I’d learned. First, passports are not like magical free Carvel ice cream for life cards. Much like makeup and good girls, they go bad. Second, the State Department is fully aware of the travel pickles that goofballs like me get into and even has a secret unofficial plan to deal with us, which is comforting from a faith-in-government point of view. Third, fire hydrants are not good hiding places for unopened bags of chestnuts. (Somebody took mine.)

But it was my friend Christine, one of several pals on emotional support standby throughout the passport ordeal, who pinpointed the most important lesson of all.

“However frustrating it seems,” she texted me while I waited in the bakery, “it’s still somewhat comforting to have problems that can be solved with money.”

She had a point. I was lucky that I had money to bail myself out, and very lucky to have the money to go abroad in the first place. 2012 was a year that reminded me how many problems, personal and otherwise, won’t go away no matter how much money gets thrown at them. I’d do well to remember that I’m pretty damn lucky anytime my issues are smaller than the size of my checking account.

In fact, that was true of all of us waiting in line outside the Passport Agency. We bonded over our blunders and our shared commitment to talking about travel plans in the conditional tense. But we didn’t talk about how fortunate we were just to be standing on Hudson Street in the pre-dawn cold on the last morning of the year, listening to the clang and rumble of garbage trucks, passing around greasy bags of hash browns. For the moment we had clarity of purpose. In daily life, most people try to wrangle a hundred duck-sized horses. Now our worries were winnowed down to a simple horse-sized duck. We wanted to begin 2013 on a white-sand beach, by the steps to the Parthenon, surrounded by family in Auckland, walking down the cobblestone streets of Galway just as the sun settled into a definite rise. We had hastily assembled forms and runny noses and a last-ditch plan that depended on the benevolence of government workers. We did not have appointments. We had hope that our dumb mistakes might yet prove reversible, that the new year would take us wherever we wanted to go.

Sarah Todd blogs about feminism and popular culture over at Girls Like Giants.

We asked our contributors to take a look back at their year in $$$. Sarah Todd learned a very important lesson.

“Want to go to Iceland?” my friend texted me on Halloween night. She was in California. I was at a bar in Massachusetts dressed as one-fourth of French KISS, wearing a beret and a striped t-shirt and white face paint with cat makeup. I didn’t know the difference between the KISS band members, so I’d volunteered to be the boring one. My whiskers were melting.

“YES TELL ME MORE,” I wrote back.

All night, we traded excited texts about flights and hot springs and northern lights. But the truth was that I didn’t know if I could afford to go to Iceland. Technically speaking, I didn’t even know if I had money to spare for another Stella. For most of 2012, the year I decided to get real about money, I have been very confused about what I can and can’t afford. 

Before this year, I didn’t have a lot of dollars—grad school and living in New York will do that to you—so I just didn’t sweat my financial future. Now I have a pretty stable job and a few freelance gigs on the side. I have student loans but no credit card debt. I’m not raking in the big bucks, but I make enough to cover living expenses and put away some money each month for retirement and savings, and even throw extra cash at my student loans.

With the long-term goals of building up savings and whacking down student loan debt, part of me feels like I can’t afford to spend money on things that aren’t necessities (things like trips to Iceland, just for example). But I also frequently feel like getting YOLO shaved into my head and buying a pair of Frye boots and an alpaca farm.

It is a conundrum.

Nonetheless, I’ve figured out this much: I definitely can’t afford to spend money on stuff that doesn’t matter to me. For example, I don’t have the funds to eat out very often. But that is fine! This year I decided to cook almost exclusively at home. Most of my mainstay dishes use pretty cheap ingredients: scrambled eggs and roasted chickpeas, kale chips, baked potatoes, stir-frys, salads heavily doused in olive oil and salt, pasta with cannellini beans and spinach and canned tomatoes. I joined a community garden in late spring, and for months I had more basil and string beans and bok choy than I knew what to do with. I haven’t missed going to restaurants at all; if my friends are going out to eat, I just meet up with them for a drink before or after.

I also kept my clothes shopping down in 2012. This year, I bought a long-sleeved shift from H&M and a dress from Marshall’s to wear to a wedding. Two pairs of black tights. Two t-shirts and a sundress from a thrift store. I thought not shopping much this year might make me feel frumpy, but it didn’t–I actually didn’t even notice how little I was buying. Six new items in my wardrobe felt like plenty.

Because I decided that I couldn’t afford to pick up a burrito at lunch or spring for a new messenger bag, I could afford to do things that were really important to me this year. I bought a ticket to my friends’ wedding in Texas this March. We went to a family farm in Beeville and drank lemonade at picnic tables in the front yard. We took a hay ride out to a grove of weeping willows and watched our friends say I do surrounded by daisy chains. Afterward, the guests huddled around a bonfire and laughed with the bride as she shouted that the hip-hop songs the DJ was playing weren’t dirty enough. Before I flew home, I spent a day and a half slamming through Austin in a tornado of fried avocado tacos and bluegrass and kayaks and bridge bats.

I could afford to say yes when a friend asked me to be a bridesmaid in her wedding next June. I decided that I had enough money to fly out to Oregon to visit friends from graduate school. I could buy tickets to outdoor concerts this summer and hear James Taylor and the Silk Road Ensemble and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I took myself to Montreal. All of these things cost money that I could have directed in more responsible directions. But I’m really glad I didn’t.

Deciding what I can afford was trickier in other scenarios. For the first six months of the year, I thought I could afford to buy books from authors and small presses and indie bookstores that I wanted to support. I bought Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan and Dodie Bellamy’s The Buddhist and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. I bought books by Meghan Daum and Julia Wertz and Junot Diaz.

But as the year went on and I started running out my weekly budget way in advance, I realized that I couldn’t buy books from all the authors that I wished I could. I started going to the library more often, the existence of which fills me with Oscar-winner levels of amazement and gratitude. (What did I ever do to deserve a free book?) I borrowed books from friends and felt a surge of guilt when someone I followed on Tumblr posted about the importance of paying for art you believe in.

Problems like this came up for me all the time this year. I want my dollars to support the people and things and causes I care about. But I can’t afford to spend money on all of them, and the way that I choose between them is haphazard at best. Why do I donate to NPR but not to other podcasts I listen to? Why do I give money to Planned Parenthood one month but not the next? Why could I buy Fiona Apple’s new CD but stick to listening to the Alabama Shakes on Spotify? I don’t have a solid, ethically reliable measuring stick to help me make these choices–at least, not yet.

Sometimes figuring out what I can afford is less about logic and more about arbitrary whims. There were days this year when I’d resist renting Bachelorette on iTunes and splurge on fancy conditioner an hour later. And sometimes I couldn’t actually afford the things I thought I could. A cheap day trip to New York ended up costing me a lot of dough when I got off the train one stop before my transfer station and realized I’d left my phone on board to boot. I spent $110 extra dollars getting home and $45 more when Metro North shipped my phone back to me. (Hats off to the fine people at Metro North Lost & Found, however! They’re like the Department of Mysteries in their labyrinthian secrecy, but they have an 80% return rate on high-value items.)

These days, I’m realizing that what I can and can’t afford is about more than the numbers in my bank account. It’s about priorities: Whether my dollars will make more of a difference for one person or organization or cause than another, whether doing one thing will prevent me from doing something else, and whether that will be worth the sacrifice. But also, figuring out affordability is kind of like solving the hardest Nancy Drew mystery of all time. I will probably never completely crack the case.

The day after Halloween, my friend and I figured out how much the trip to Iceland would cost including transportation and food and lodging and day trips. When we tallied up the total, it came to about $1,700. I looked at my bank account and my budget, and I told my friend, sadly, that it was too much. I was worried that not going meant missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime experience, or that my friend would be disappointed. Still, I knew that I had to say no. I threw out another option—I might be able to afford to go someplace cheaper.

My friend understood right away; looking at the numbers, she said she couldn’t really afford to go to Iceland either. Together we made a list of all the places we wanted to go. Then we started comparing flight prices and reading up on articles about budget travel for each of our top destinations. Eventually we found flights and a daily travel budget that would be cheap enough, and we giddily clicked “purchase tickets.”

On New Year’s Eve, I’ll be in Ireland, ringing in 2013. I can afford it.

Sarah Todd blogs about feminism and popular culture over at Girls Like Giants.

This summer, inspired largely by Pinterest vision boards, I vowed to be more proactive about whale-watching, organizing spice jars in unexpected ways, and making terrariums with tiny people in them—and also about travel. I’d spent hours at my computer perusing Kayak and plotting imaginary trips to Ireland and Alaska and Costa Rica and Japan. But my globe-trotting ambitions faced two big obstacles. First, I didn’t have a lot of extra dollars to spare. Second, the logistics of finding a travel companion with a compatible schedule, budget, and level of passport validity seemed daunting.

Tired of putting off adventures, I decided to take the solo budget travel plunge. I settled on Montreal for my first run over Columbus Day weekend. It was close enough to New England for a quick jaunt north, had a big blue river and a killer arts scene, and offered opportunities aplenty to eat frites and practice limited French. Going in, I had two big goals: Keep costs down and meet some peeps. I did both! And in the process I added the city of Arcade Fire (but, confusingly, not the city of Of Montreal) to my mental Pinterest dreams. In the end I spent about $345 USD on four nights and three days’ worth of transportation, lodging, food, and good times. For my fellow solo thrifty travelers out there, here’s what I learned. 

If you’ve got a car and it’s not too far: Maybe drive it?
Driving to Montreal and back from Western Massachusetts (a five-hour trip) cost me about $96—a quarter of how much I would have had to pay for a plane ticket. The one downside of traveling by car was dealing with a scary border patrol agent on the return trip. My claim that I had gone to Montreal for fun turned out to be a wild red flag for the agent, who began blitzing me with questions about my personal and professional history. It all reached an apex when she asked about the last time I’d been to Canada.

I thought back. “I went to Vancouver a couple Thanksgivings ago with my family?”
“Why’d you do that? Do you have relatives there?” she said, wrinkling her nose to indicate that nobody in their right mind would venture across the border unless absolutely necessary.
“No,” I said apologetically.
“So why’d you go?”
I knew she wouldn’t like the answer, but there was no way around it. “For fun,” I said.
Then she ordered me to pop the trunk.

Using AirBnB can save a bundle.
This was my first time using AirBnB, and I picked my room based on the following criteria:

• It was cheap: $119 for three nights, including the AirBnB fee, plus a $100 security deposit.
• It was a two-minute walk to the Vendôme subway station, and the reviews said that it was in a safe neighborhood.
• Many previous visitors had showered host P. with praise, which persuaded me that staying with him would be a good way to not get murdered. Clearly I was still a little nervous about getting murdered, however, because searching for “murder” and “Montreal” in my Gchat history brings up seven results.

Spoiler: I did not get murdered! P. was out of town the whole time I was there, so I had the apartment to myself—a clean, spare place with sloping hardwood floors and chipped paint. The guest bedroom had a daybed, brightly colored Haitian art on the walls, paper Ikea lamps, and a little computer station. The neighborhood was nothing special (my block had a Subway, a gas station, and several cell phone stores), but it was well-lit with plenty of foot traffic, so I felt secure walking home alone at night.

Make a meal plan.
I knew I wanted to try some of Montreal’s cuisine—but I also wanted to make sure that eating out didn’t swallow my wallet whole. So before I headed to Montreal, I stocked up on $25 worth of supplies: MacIntosh apples, crunchy peanut butter, a loaf of mysteriously named yoga bread, bananas, a variety pack of instant oatmeal, almonds, and a bag of cheddar soy chips that I devoured in the first 10 minutes of the road trip.

In Montreal, I’d make myself oatmeal for breakfast and pack a sandwich for a lunch-on-the-go. I also carried almonds for emergency snacking. This worked great! Then I just followed my heart (within reason) after 5 pm. Among the good eats I had over four days, for under $70 total: a delicious, life-restoring $2 latte from Casa del Popolo; french fries in a paper cone with little cups of aioli and cauliflower-onion-cornichon mustard sauce; a Brasseurs De Montréal beer packed with ginger and lime; multiple hard apple ciders; a homey bowl of ratatouille with French bread and olive tapenade; a giant plate of Brie, pears, arugula, and baguette slices; a veggie gyro from a hole-in-the-wall Greek restaurant; and a farewell asparagus-and-cheese crepe.

Take advantage of the city’s public transportation.
Cabs are for Carrie Bradshaw and the Grey Poupon man (post-financial meltdown I bet he ditched the limo), and driving is for people who understand where they are going. A trusty public transportation system, on the other hand, can’t be beat. With just four clearly color-coded subway lines, Montreal is a breeze to navigate. I paid $16 for a 3-day pass and zipped all over the city on Montreal’s rail. My feet got some decent pavement-pounding in, too.

Find the free stuff.
Montreal is super-walkable, and I spent a lot of time just wandering around, especially in Mile End. The neighborhood has tons of cool street art—telephone poles papered with Uncle Sam “I want you ignorant” posters; a parking garage covered in black-and-white cartoons of gnomes and dragons; the face of a beaming 1940s-era woman splashed across a brick wall. Mile End also has many cool stores that I could not afford. In one, I admired a ring topped with a lion. When you slid it on, the lion stretched across three of your fingers–the jungle king of brass knuckles. It was $20. I did not buy it, but I can still hear it roaring sometimes.

I got a good fixing of free cultural and historical landmarks, too. One afternoon I visited the enormous, friendly Musee des Beaux Arts, which charges no admission, and ogled paintings by Picasso and Basquiat. Afterward I climbed to the top of Mont Royal, a park created by All the Coolest Parks designer Fredrick Law Olmsted. The summit was like a UN meeting: tourists speaking Spanish and Mandarin and German and English in various accents snapped pictures of the city beneath a powder-blue sky. I also paid $5 for admission to Basilique Notre Dame and sat for a while in a pew, eavesdropping on tour guides and gazing up at the ceiling, deep blue and scattered with stars.

Say yes to strangers.
AirBnB turned out to be not just a frugal choice but a great way to meet people. Since my host P. was out of town, he arranged for his friend M.—a pretty, dark-haired software engineer in her early thirties—to let me into the building. M. showed me where the towels were and gave me the wireless password. Then she paused. “My friends and I going to a bar,” she said. “Want to come?”

It was 11:30 at night, and I was beat after a full day of work and five hours’ drive north. But was I in Montreal for sleeping? “Sure,” I said.

Thanks to M., I had an unforgettable first night in the city: I got to meet a bunch of awesome Montrealers, along with a few Moroccans, one Colombian, and a smattering of French persons. We headed first to Baldwin Barmacie, a pharmacy-themed bar with skinny-jeaned men and women in draped tanks dancing under the glow of little illuminated vials. Later, we relocated to a low-key bar with wood tables shaped like T’s–a genius way to enable large-group conversations. I learned about Quebec politics (contentious) and potholes (the size of your car, sometimes!). Around 3 a.m., the women piled into M.’s car and headed home—but not before stopping on a hill that overlooked the city sprawled large, twinkling in the dark. C., a Colombian fashion designer, pointed out the doughnut-shaped Olympic stadium, the Jacques Cartier bridge, and the dark patch where her apartment was. A., a law student, asked a teenage girl with eyebrow piercings to take our picture. The girl swore as she fiddled with the flash on A.’s smartphone. When it finally went off, capturing the four of us with our arms slung around each other’s shoulders, I thought about how I was just making a cameo in these womens’ lives–but for that night, they made me feel like a regular.

Look up an old pal.
I sometimes feel paranoid about getting in touch with casual friends when I pass through their cities—what if secretly we have become enemies since the last time we talked, and I just didn’t get the notification? Nonetheless, I did a quick search on Facebook to see if I knew anyone in Montreal and found that a friend from my high school French class, M.F., was currently a PhD student at McGill. We met up for dinner on Saturday. After all those speaking scenarios asking for invisible croque monsieurs at pretend cafes, ordering food together at a bistro on St. Laurent felt totally natural. (The bistro also happened to be celebrating its anniversary–every so often our reminiscing was interrupted by a waiter bearing a platter of (free!) mini-pizzas or a magician with a little green card table in tow.) Much to my relief, M.F. and I were not enemies. We were amis, still.

Sit at the bar.
I ate at a bar on my last night in Montreal, planning to take advantage of the cheaper bar menu and read The Tipping Point. Instead, I ended up chatting with the bartender and the motley crew of people sitting alongside me (anarchist guy with his hair in a topknot; businessman working on his laptop; a group of students celebrating a birthday). The students bought a round of shots for everyone perched at the bar, which I’m sure helped increase the chances of camaraderie. The shots were golden and sweet–the kind you can sip if you need to.

Have a project.
If you’re shy but social (much like a hobbit), having a purpose in mind–a web comic, a photo series, a list of your favorite murals or cafes in a city–can inspire you to reach out to new people. I decided that I would write about the trip, which gave me a little extra courage to strike up random conversations. After all, I needed material.

Sarah Todd blogs about feminism and popular culture over at Girls Like Giants. 

When people think about the things they’d save in a fire, they usually include at least a few sentimental objects: photo albums, love letters, a tattered stuffed tiger they’ve had since they were born. I’d definitely try to rescue the memory book my grandmother gave me when I was fourteen.

In her slim-looped cursive, she writes about growing up on a farm in Tennessee and living through the Great Depression. I’m pretty sure the book contains all the secrets to life: how to be open-hearted, how to be gutsy, how to make these perfect flaky rolls that wreck every dinner party because nobody can help filling up on them before the main course.

I love that book, and if I lost it I’d be incredibly sad. But I’d get over it. I know that because of the flood. 

In August 2007, I was between apartments in New York City. My friend Alyssa and I were getting a place together, but her old lease expired a month after mine. I stored my things in the basement of my old apartment in Windsor Terrace, just around the block from a fireman’s bar that served Coors Light in huge Styrofoam cups.

Meanwhile, my very kind friend Ari said that I could stay at her apartment in Park Slope for the month. At the time Ari worked for a fancy bakery that specialized in custom-designed cakes. She kept a portfolio of her favorite projects: a personalized Monopoly board for some (probably embarrassed) thirteen-year-old’s bar mitzvah, a cake in the shape of a sneaker for a fitness-obsessed executive. Since Ari had to work early in the morning she zonked out before 10 pm every night, which meant that even though we were both sleeping in her bed, we didn’t actually see each other that often.

Did this make me a good houseguest or a horrible one? I couldn’t tell. I wasn’t seeing much of most people that month, regardless. I was applying to new jobs and to graduate school; in the meantime I was holding down a part-time gig at a nonprofit and an unpaid internship at an independent journal. In the evenings Alyssa and I would dive into the Hunger Games arena that is renting in NYC. The search was pretty discouraging, but I didn’t mind. I was just grateful that we were friends again. We’d been BFFs through college, a dynamic duo whether we were at wine-soaked parties or pulling all-nighters in the computer lab. But our friendship hit a rocky patch once we got to the city. In a fairly half-baked scheme, we’d decided to room together about five minutes after making up. The gamble seemed to be working. We pounded the streets, gossiping about prospective landlords and inventing imitations of animals to pass the time. “Hawk?” I’d say, and she’d fan her arms and jut her head out, steely-gazed.

In the midst of all that hustle, the voicemails on my phone started building up. The higher the count got, the more horrible it seemed it would be to actually listen to them. So when my former landlord called to warn me that an impending storm was probably going to flood the basement, and that I should move my boxes to a higher level, I didn’t get his message until it was too late.

In fact, I didn’t hear it until after I entered the basement on moving day and was greeted with a blast of mildew. The boxes were soggy at the bottom; the concrete floors were still damp. I wanted to cry right then, but I waited until I was alone in my new 15×6 foot room on Carroll Street. I unpacked the boxes and started to assess the damage.

Most of my pictures were destroyed. This was before I’d transitioned into the world of digital cameras, and these were the only copies I had. The flood had wiped clean photos of my childhood dog, the leafy Michigan summer camp where I’d been a counselor, the only photograph I still had of me with my high school boyfriend, college road trips to San Francisco and Joshua Tree.

My books were swollen with water, mold collecting on their edges. Later I’d try to dry them out on the fire escape, but most were too damaged (and smelly) to keep. A lot of the books I lost were from my college poetry professor—stacks of Anna Akhmatova and Wislawa Szymborska and W.S. Merwin that he’d earmarked especially for me. Once, freshman year, while passing each other on the street, he’d reached into his back pocket and passed me The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib without even breaking his stride. The books he’d given me were proof that someone out there thought I had potential, and I clung to them in the world of post-collegiate entry-level jobs, where opportunities for creativity were few and “willingness to perform monotonous tasks” was often a prerequisite.

There were plenty more sentimental casualties: My mom’s vintage cardigan, which she’d somehow managed to preserve perfectly for thirty years before her reckless kid came along and refused to check her voicemail. The delicate pencil drawings an artist friend I was certain would be famous one day had sketched while we lay on the beach.

I’d always been a little superstitious about objects, believing that anything I associated with the people I loved was a kind of benevolent horcrux—a piece of them stayed inside. As a kid I kept a scrap of yellow-diamond wallpaper from my family’s old dining room tucked in my nightstand drawer for years. But now I had two options. Either I could follow the lead of a depressive cartoon brontosaurus and walk around saying All My Friends Are Dead, or I could find a way to let this go.

Sorting through all my ruined things, I made up my mind to get punk rock about this ordinary damage. What did it matter if half the things I owned were gone forever? Plenty of people had lost much more. I could tough it out. I’d chant “Creation, destruction” right along with Marky Mark and Isabelle Huppert. I’d channel Frank O’Hara in this emergency, put on my dirtiest of suntans and spit on the lock. It was one of the first times I rode that defiant high that comes when the world is banging you around and you decide that you don’t care. It’s a pretty badass feeling, if you can persuade yourself to believe it.

That night, after I’d bagged up everything I couldn’t keep, Alyssa and I ordered pizza from Joe’s. Ari brought over a six-pack of beer and we all went out on the stoop of our new apartment to eat dinner. We talked about the movies we wanted to see at the Cobble Hill theater, with its anomalously cheap-for-New-York ticket prices; the wine and cheese picnics we’d have on the unfinished roof; the devoted exercising habits of our new roommate Caleb. I put the waterlogged photos and books and clothes into a drawer with that scrap of wallpaper. Every time it slid open, I slammed it right back shut.

It was the first day of September, and there was a snapping-turtle chill to the air that meant summer was really over. My personal statement for graduate school was almost ready. I had a new, full-time job and big plans. My friends were my bedrock, and sitting with them on the stairs I felt at home. I didn’t know that by that time next year, I’d have lost my great-aunt’s cameo ring, half the music I owned, and any focus on my writing that I’d managed to build up since graduating college. I’d be starting grad school in the rainy Northwest and wondering why I’d ever left New York, a city with a reputation for hard-nosed cynicism but where the people I knew were lit up with easy generosity and the kind of quiet ambition that leans forward, steadfast as a hawk. It’s no great tragedy, but it still hurts worse than anything about the flood: That time next year, I was gone.

Sarah Todd is in her tree talking to the Dixie Chicks and they’re making her feel better.

Back before I got in touch with my inner vegetable, I brought home disappointing produce on the regular. I’d fork over a few quarters only to chomp into some mealy apple, and I’d think, What for? (Fiber.) To what end? (Doctor-prevention.) Subpar fruits and vegetables offended my sense of financial justice: If I was going to pay three Snickers bars’ worth of dollars in exchange for some beets, it only seemed fair to expect a similar level of consistency as I got in my candy bars. Produce was highway robbery! And yet, since toaster strudel jam did not provide enough vitamin C to prevent me from getting scurvy like a common pirate, I had to learn the ways of my herbaceous nemeses. I became the Produce Whisperer.

In the process, I collected a bounty of tips for gathering the ripest, freshest, crispest and/or juiciest fruits and vegetables in all the land. Today I am going to share them with you. Maybe one day we’ll meet cute squeezing cantaloupes side by side at Safeway. Probably not, though, because that’s an important moment and I wouldn’t want to interrupt.

One thing I want to get out of the way—the best produce is probably in your garden or at the farmer’s market, but sometimes that’s not an option. Maybe your farmer’s market is too expensive. Maybe you don’t have space for a garden. Maybe it’s February and you live in Wisconsin and let’s be realistic about what the possibilities of local food movements are when you live in the TUNDRA. (I’m talking to you, Ms. Fancy Year-Round-Avocadoes Alice Waters.) For the purposes of this exercise, let’s assume that you are not in a farmer’s market and so you need to be in Constant Vigilance mode, though these tips will fine at an organic stand, too.

1.  Apples: Use the snap test. Press lightly on an apple with your thumb and listen for a tiny snapping sound and a little pop-crunch beneath your finger. If you’ve got it, you’re golden! Though hopefully you’re not getting a golden delicious, the second-worst apple. (Red delicious is the first-worst.)

2.  Avocadoes and mangos: Use the finger press test. This is the opposite of the apple snap test—you’re looking for some give when you press on the skin, enough to leave a very slight indent. That yield is the key to the buttery avocado and smooth mango of your dreams. If there’s not much resistance when you press down, the fruit is probably past its prime. Avoid avocadoes with skins that are either dark brownish (too ripe) or bright green (not ripe enough). Mangos can be red or yellow or green in whatever combination, let their freak flags fly.

3. Bananas: Just kidding, I’m not going to tell you how to pick a banana. Everybody likes them different ways (Spotted! Slightly green! Pure yellow!) and anyway you’re an adult, you live in the world.

4. Pineapples: Pineapples are complicated, like Blair Waldorf. Therefore picking one out is high maintenance, but worth it, like having Blair Waldorf be your girlfriend. The first, easiest step is to smell the pineapple. Do you smell something sweet? Great, you’re on your way! No? Try smelling some other pineapples. If none of the pineapples smell, maybe your nose is broken, what now?

The second step is to look at the pineapple’s color. Ideally you want the yellow creeping on up toward the pineapple’s little leaf-hairdo. The pineapple industry will try to tell you that a pineapple can be fully green and still ripe, but that’s a trap to try to get you to buy their shoddy pineapples.

You can also pull on a leaf if you want. It won’t tell you anything, but maybe it’ll help you release some of that pent-up aggression you brought into the grocery store today, tiger. You might also try pressing on the skin to see if it’s got a little yield to it—that would be good—but honestly it’s still going to be a bit of a gamble.

It’s also worth noting that while pineapples have the personality of Blair Waldorf, they look more like Serena Van Der Woodson.

5.  Figs: The uglier, the better. This is great, because figs are like the velveteen rabbits of fruit. Is your fig splitting a little at the seams? Totally fine. Is it a weird blackish-purple color? Don’t hate, that’s the Turkish variety’s personal style. Just make sure the stem’s not too loose—it’s a telltale sign of inner mushiness. Now tell your fig a bedtime story, but don’t get too attached, because figs are food not friends.

6. Artichokes: These are my favorite, because they’re a project food. You get to take them apart really slowly and then at the end you get a prize! It’s like writing a dissertation but faster and actually fun. The best artichokes have leaves that are still tight facing toward the center. The leaves should squeak a little bit if you rub them against each other, like timid mice.

A few other tips: In general, don’t buy produce in bags at the grocery store unless we’re talking hard-to-mess-up items like potatoes and onions. The stores like to gather up all their least enticing produce and put them in a bag where you can’t test them. If you’re buying berries in a clear plastic box, always look at the underside so you can see if they’re all squished at the bottom.

Voila, you are a produce wizard! Now you will get the maximum taste bang for your buck, and all your friends will be so impressed with your produce-picking secret talent. Then they will try to convince you that your second secret talent is cutting mangoes, but that is because they don’t like cutting mangoes, it’s too messy. Don’t let them trick you.

Sarah Todd is mentally casting an all-fruit version of Pretty Little Liars. She blogs about feminism and popular culture over at Girls Like Giants.