I’ve spent a lot of the last year driving back and forth across and up and down the United States in that awkward quarter-life crisis period toeing the, uh, thin line between “work” and “pleasure” in a precarious economy. You’d think that by the time I moved from rural California to Iowa by myself (with my bike strapped to the top of my car, in the span of three days), I would have figured out…

I. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN When I am driving across the desert at 85 miles per hour just after sunup moving back from Iowa channeling my mother’s father who died on the job trucking liquid nitrogen in three-day stretches around the country I am thinking about how perhaps the most subversive thing a female can do is travel alone. In the past year, during which I have I have lived in five different cities…