Millionaire Matchmaker. Season Two. Bravo.

Five years ago, when my grandfather could still walk around, he and my grandmother would drive into the city some Sunday mornings and meet me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They would wait for me—I was late, inevitably—in the lobby, near the lavish bouquets that some particularly impractical philanthropist had caused to perpetually bloom there. I would spot them there and, for some reason, stop and stare at them for a moment before they saw me and try to imagine what I'd think of them if I wasn't their grandchild.

Nana always wore a silk-scarf headband and lavish makeup. Poppy wore a polo sweater and neatly pressed, almost hipsterishly slouchy chinos. They would see me and advance, grinning, and my grandmother would press a little aluminum Met admission button into my palm that I would punch onto the edge of my jeans pocket, and then we would wobble slowly through one of the entranceways, clutching each other's hands.

I would have figured them, especially given the setting, for rich people, which was of course the point. Read More

I'm on Zoram's Strand and this lvl 23 Tauren son of a bitch is camping me. Every time I steer my soul back into my body and rezz he takes advantage of my low health and ganks me without mercy. As I'm going down for the fifth time I send out a call on Local Defense, then steer my will o'wisp soul back from the rezzy point to my corpse. Just when I get to my body I see them thundering through the purple fields like the cavalry: a Shaman, a Warrior, and a Hunter, and they pwn that smug Tauren all over the glade. I rezz just in time to sink my kris into his back and he goes down like a ton of pixilated bricks and we're off, running through the field, taking lazy leaps and rolls like a group of fighter jets. Someone says "LFG Sleeper Awakens" and we all click yes, and we're off to escort the Druid Bearclaw through contested territories to Maestra's Post, my comrades and I. Carsickness, Gangrene, Isoceles, and NancyReagan running through the woods with murder on our minds and digital sunlight on our faces. I'm playing World of Warcraft and I've never been happier. Read More

After college I went back to California and took a job at a shop that made customized glassware, like brandy snifters with the names of resorts on them or champagne flutes with romantic quotations engraved around the rim. Most of the business came from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Hawaii, the three capitals of west coast leisure. My job was to tape plastic stencils to the glasses, each with the logo of a hotel or casino—"The Mirage," "The Bellagio," "Kapalua"—or a touristic phrase like "Hang Ten in Hawaii." The glasses were then taken into a garage, where a man in a plastic-lined booth would etch the glass by shooting a high-powered stream of sand through a pneumatic gun attached to an air compressor. The sand bounced off the plastic stencil but gradually abraded the exposed areas of the glass, leaving the text engraved into its surface. Afterwards the glasses were cleaned, boxed, and sent out to gift shops where, to judge by the number of pieces I processed in my nine-month stay at the job, they lined the shelves of liquor cabinets the world over. Read More