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How to piss off someone who meditates

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Ask, “Don’t you get sore sitting in one position for so long?”Of course you do! The point of meditation is not to feel perfectly happy folded onto a zafu cushion…it’s to recognize when you feel stiff or sore and notice it before letting it go. Unpleasant situations arise in life all the time and you can’t do anything about them, so meditation is good practice for being able to deal with problems without freaking out and believing your legs are going to fall off.

The way to unite the world is through travel: An interview with Andrew McCarthy

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Ayun Halliday on budget travel and “No Touch Monkey!”

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5 classic Christmas films

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Another excuse to drink in Lawrence, KS

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10 small music venues in San Francisco that are good to go

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Editor'S Choice

29 baller castles you can rent on Airbnb

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And the neighbors keep trippin’, I’m like “I’m in a castle … f*ck your condo.”– Macklemore, “Castles”IT’S BEEN A DREAM of mine to stay in a real castle since I was a young kid. My parents would break the mundane summers indoors in Vegas by taking my little brother and me to the arcade at the Excalibur Hotel.

Pacific Coast Highway: The quintessential California road trip

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THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY, formally known as California State Route 1, is the ultimate road trip route, tracing the California coast for more than 650 miles from Mendocino County in the north to Orange County in the south. It’s designated an All-American Road for its scenic views, and it packs one heck of a path past some pretty rad attractions.

Travel writing at ground level 2: Notes on the ‘underground’

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Visit MatadorU to learn more about Matador’s online travel journalism courses.In our continuing study of Ground Level as an ethic for travel writing, we look now at the importance of recognizing what’s “underground,” and how failing to find it can lead stories – even with all facts “correct” – to be untrue.

How to piss off a Texan

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Mess with Texas.You most likely associate the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas” with cheesy t-shirts and that unmistakable brand of Texas swagger.What you don’t know is that the slogan is the product of a 1980s anti-littering campaign and a federally registered trademark of the Texas Department of Transportation.

Read this if you dare: Why are straight readers afraid of gay writers?

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One of the job hazards of being a writer is that people frequently ask you for reading recommendations. However, in my experience, they’re not always interested in the books you’re actually reading.Take, for example, the recent award-winning road novel A Horse Named Sorrow by Trebor Healey. Set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the book follows the journey of a young man who gets on a bike and sets out from San Francisco to Buffalo, New York, to return his lover’s ashes to his hometown.

Koh Rong: The last real party in Southeast Asia

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Southeast Asia is hardly the final frontier when it comes to backpacking. Buses specially tailored for foreign tourists line every Bangkok street corner; tubing the Nam Song in Laos ends with gift shops; pancakes and spaghetti are ubiquitous even in Burma.When I first went to Koh Phangan in 2013, I was expecting this — just a few days in Southeast Asia and you quickly learn of Koh Phangan’s reputation as the go-to place for manufactured buzz and bliss.