Loner Shark

Six TED Talks for Creatives

TEDs are a great source of inspiration as a meeting ground for ideas. They’ve launched a number of careers for some really great thinkers and problem solvers. I’ve compiled a list of TED Talks for creatives, those of us who write, make art, or just want to live creatively through our jobs and even daily tasks. These presentations focus on where creativity comes from and mindsets for reaching our…

How I Live a Joyful Life Through Daily Engagement

I’ve settled on the realization that joy and contentment in life are about engagement with our everyday rituals. A few days ago I had a conversation with a friend about this and we agreed that being intentional with our most basic decisions is hugely important to overall quality of life. The pandemic has forced me to establish a sense of personal alignment and self-reliance that has manifested…

The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website—metmeseum.org—now hosts a free, educational virtual archive dedicated to over 8,000 works of art that span global history. This collection offers a chronology of artworks based on region of origin and era as well as essays and a digital gallery of the entire collection with drop-down filters. Left to right: Plaque: Warrior and Attendants, Edo ; The…

NYC’s “Little Paris” Neighborhood

Wedged between Soho, Chinatown and Nolita, Centre Street from Broome and Grande St. is now considered Manhattan’s “Little Paris”. A very much up-and-coming neighborhood, the newly dubbed district (with its own signage) offers a place to get authentic croissants, champagne, artisan scents, shop French brands and even learn the language. I recently explored the area, enjoying a fluffy slice of…

Martha Beck uses The Divine Comedy as an Allegory for Finding Authenticity

Martha Beck’s book The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self illustrates how honesty and freeing ourselves from cultural expectations opens up our lives to our true nature. The book is structured around Dante’s The Divine Comedy, using Dante’s journey down into the Inferno, up the Mount of Purgatory, and eventual rise to Paradise as metaphors for the path to healing that each of us…

The YouTube Series is the Ultimate Charming Escape

Mental health experts have recommended limiting the time we spend online and watching television during quarantine. By the time I took this advice to heart, I had already scoured all of YouTube, but- lucky for you- I managed to find the best new web series out there.

Doing it Ourselvesis about a family renovating a historic chateau in France. It is charming, educational, and the right amount of…

Turn and face the strange -David Bowie

As we know, life moves in seasons and this is the season of my life in which I uproot, evaluate, and find a new beginning. Appropriately timed with autumn, I have shed what I knew for so long. For over twenty-five years I lived in Atlanta, other than the two years I spent in Florida during graduate school. At the beginning of September I packed up my life…

London, Now and Then

My first impression of London, when I stepped off the Heathrow-Express at Paddington Station, was that it didn’t sound like London. I heard accents and languages from many other countries, but the British accent, which had been trained into my American mind via television and film, blended in among the many tourists and migrants from elsewhere in Europe and beyond.

As a city that has become a…

Monthly Wrap: March 2019

Monthly Wrap is my monthly post about recent happenings and things I’m loving or just feel like sharing. In other words, whatever happens to be taking up space in my brain. Here’s where my head has been lately:

London Called

I had an amazing time in London this month. On a week-long vacation, my boyfriend and I visited the city of Charles Dickens, Big Ben and the Thames. We spent most of our…

Original Flash Fiction: “Falling Stars”

Do you remember the time we got lost within the nebula? You sneezed cosmic dust for a week and the helium made our voices sound like aliens. I was worried, but you made me laugh and forget.

“Oh no, we’re doomed!” You kept saying in that ridiculous, high pitched voice until you laughed as hard as me and our sides ached as we zipped through the cloud. You’ve always had a knack for saying the wrong…

I’ve been to New York City a number of times with family, friends, and groups. These trips have always been a lot of fun and memorable, but there is so much to do in New York and the only way I could make an itinerary around the things that I wanted to do, without compromise, was to go alone. With plans to meet my family over the weekend, I flew up a couple days prior and embarked on a very…

Goodbye, 2018… or It’s Been a Year Already?

What to say about a year that was more transition than tangible growth? There were a number of fun events along the way- travel, the new things I tried and sprang up in my life, but overall 2018 was more of a roundabout of self-reflection that seemed play on a loop. In the end, I think I’ve finally reflected myself into some discoveries, which means 2019 will be about prioritizing these…

NYD’s Top 8 Posts of 2018

It’s interesting to go back and compare my posts from year to year, allowing me to take inventory of how Neptune Your Dialevolves and potential changes for the coming year. This year, I noticed a shift in content as well as a clearer idea of what I want this blog to represent. I have started focussing more on literature, travel and nostalgia (as the tagline suggests), but I’ve also made my posts…

This Week in Liz: Breaking Busy and Enjoying the Spare Moments

The list of ways I can occupy my time has become endless. There’s the full-time job, then my creative writing as well as Neptune Your Dial, plus keeping up with posting content on social media, not to mention all the daily tasks- making a dentist appointment, going to yoga class, getting an oil change, walking the dog. Just writing all of this makes me tired, but I can’t complain because it’s…