This year, I am shaking up my little world by living in Brazil and traveling elsewhere. I started a new blog to chronicle my travels . . . it’s called My Unplanned Adventure and you can check it out here.
Join Me to Launch the Brazilian version of Quirkyalone!
May 02, 2010 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Featured, Travel

Natalia, a quirkyalone in Florianopolis, devours SoSingular!
Santa Teresa, a hilltop neighborhood that is often compared to Montmartre in Paris for its bohemian atmosphere, rich cultural life, and (to me) intoxicating architecture is hosting an action-packed literary festival FLIST the weekend of May 15 and 16 and I am going to participate with an event to launch the Brazilian version of my book, Sósingular: Um Manifesto Para Romanticos Irredutíveis (in English, it’s Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics). Here’s a formal invite in English then in Portuguese! If you are nearby, please come by and be sosingular with us.
When: Sunday, May 16, 3 pm
Where: Terra Brasilis, Rua Murtinho Nobre, 156, just opposite the Parque das Ruinas
What: A book launch party for SoSingular: Um Manifesto Para Romanticos Irredutíveis. Join us to learn about the quirkyalone movement worldwide and to talk about single life in Rio. Meet other quirkyalones (or sosingulares) over cairpirinhas!
A quirkyalone is a person who enjoys being single (or spending time alone) and so prefers to wait for the right person to come along rather than dating indiscriminately; relishing equal doses of solitude and friendship; attracted to freedom and possibility.
For more information, visit quirkyalone.net.
_____________________
Quando: domingo, 16 de maio, 03:00
Onde: Terra Brasilis, Rua Murtinho Nobre, 156, em frente ao Parque das Ruinas
O quê: A festa de lançamento do livro para SoSingular: Um Manifesto Para Romanticos Irredutíveis.
Brazil Travel Writing, Coming Up!
Apr 14, 2010 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Single Life, Travel

My guidebook, my life, on a bus ride from Pipa to Natal in Northeast Brazil
Now I’m changing my mind. I want to take the next three months and see what it’s like if I share more of my experience with an online audience. I can’t promise consistency because the lure of experience is so great, who has time to write, edit, proofread, create links, and post photos? Somehow all these other travel bloggers like Sherry Ott and Two Backpackers and many others document their daily adventures. I don’t quite understand where they find the time, but they do. In the interest of adventure and shaking things up, let’s see what happens when I let my thoughts roam beyond my fantastically light little netbook. My writing will probably be less travelogue, and more meditation on the things I’m learning about Brazil and myself. The perspective will be de facto quirkyalone, since it’s just moi, right now, traveling Brazil in search of some transcendent experience–who knows what, at times!? Stay tuned. I look forward to seeing what the journey is like when it’s shared (with you).
Happy International Quirkyalone Day from Brazil!
Feb 05, 2010 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: IQD

My Portuguese language teachers, me, and my fellow student, enjoying our very own SoSingular
Usually I throw a party in San Francisco to celebrate, but for the first time since launching IQD in 2003, I am on the road on February 14. I am actually in Curitiba right now, a Brazilian city famed for its progressive urban planning. On IQD, I will be in the mad sea of Carnaval in Recife and Olinda, Northeastern Brazilian cities. Recife and Olinda boast a wild and participatory Carnaval (that some say is the best in the country), featuring a wide diversity of traditional music and dance: samba, axe, the drum-driven beats of maracatu and fast-paced frevo. I’ll make sure to hold up a sign, Happy IQD!, at some point. Check back here for a photo.
Quirkyalone was published in Brazil with the title SoSingular. It’s actually my favorite cover of all the international and American versions. That photo of the girl on her bed–what eyes!–is just perfect. I am traveling with a copy to share and it’s a pretty fun way to learn the nuances of a language, reading my own book.

Me learning Maracatu un Florianopolis. There are many rehearsals leading up to Carnaval.
Oh, in Brazil, the Dia dos Namoradas (Day of the Enamored) is actually June 12. They couldn’t possibly celebrate romantic love during Carnaval. Toooo crazy. If I am still here, maybe I will start Brasileiro SoSingular Day on June 12. Book your ticket now.
Wherever you are on February 14, I wish you a fabulous Quirkyalone Day! Let us know how you will celebrate in the comments.
Below are the blog posts that have generated the most comments:
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1. Radically Honest Online Dating
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2. Dear Quirkyalone: Where are all the Quirkyalone men?
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3. Happy International Quirkyalone Day from Brazil!
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4. My Big Life Churn
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5. Dear Quirkyalone: The Laws of Chemistry
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6. Dear Quirkyalone: Send Us Your Questions and Concerns, Compliments and Complaints!
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7. Brazil Travel Writing, Coming Up!
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8. Join Me to Launch the Brazilian version of Quirkyalone!
Join Me to Launch the Brazilian version of Quirkyalone!
May 02, 2010 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Featured, Travel

Natalia, a quirkyalone in Florianopolis, devours SoSingular!
Santa Teresa, a hilltop neighborhood that is often compared to Montmartre in Paris for its bohemian atmosphere, rich cultural life, and (to me) intoxicating architecture is hosting an action-packed literary festival FLIST the weekend of May 15 and 16 and I am going to participate with an event to launch the Brazilian version of my book, Sósingular: Um Manifesto Para Romanticos Irredutíveis (in English, it’s Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics). Here’s a formal invite in English then in Portuguese! If you are nearby, please come by and be sosingular with us.
When: Sunday, May 16, 3 pm
Where: Terra Brasilis, Rua Murtinho Nobre, 156, just opposite the Parque das Ruinas
What: A book launch party for SoSingular: Um Manifesto Para Romanticos Irredutíveis. Join us to learn about the quirkyalone movement worldwide and to talk about single life in Rio. Meet other quirkyalones (or sosingulares) over cairpirinhas!
A quirkyalone is a person who enjoys being single (or spending time alone) and so prefers to wait for the right person to come along rather than dating indiscriminately; relishing equal doses of solitude and friendship; attracted to freedom and possibility.
For more information, visit quirkyalone.net.
_____________________
Quando: domingo, 16 de maio, 03:00
Onde: Terra Brasilis, Rua Murtinho Nobre, 156, em frente ao Parque das Ruinas
O quê: A festa de lançamento do livro para SoSingular: Um Manifesto Para Romanticos Irredutíveis.
Continue Reading →
Radically Honest Online Dating
Sep 16, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Dating, Featured, Quirkytogether
Welcome to the online candy store of love, our dystopic world of disposable dating. Internet dating can become an exercise in ego stroking and gratification, getting emails and winks about how pretty and wonderful you are. It can be a perpetual dip into window shopping for love, rather than a means to an end of actually meeting someone and patiently getting to know them. Find a flaw, and it’s on to the next person.
In cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, where online dating has been destigmatized, it’s easy to meet someone new for drinks, much harder but to build a relationship that spans longer than four dates. So perhaps the answer is not to shy away from online dating, but to transform it.
Perhaps one solution is Radically Honest Online Dating (RHOD). The idea came to me, as most ideas do, from a conversation with a friend.
Continue Reading →
Multitasking Dementia
Sep 01, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Featured, Personal Growth, technology
I had no memory of where I parked my car. Why? While I was parking the car, a friend called. Against my better judgment I took the call. I wanted to talk to him, and I found myself so engrossed in the experience of telling him everything that happened with our mutual loved one (who is suffering from cancer) over the last month, that I had apparently no memory of where I parked the car. All I could remember was the sensation of walking over a pedestrian overpass, and looking for the spa, where ironically, I was going to relax.
The theme of the day was multitasking. I blamed multitasking for the incident. I lost my car, but first believed it might be stolen. It’s always fun when those two questions obsessively course through your brain: Did I lose my car or was it stolen? After 30 minutes of scouring for it on foot, I flagged down a cop who amazingly helped me find the car by driving around with me. He was my savior. After thirty more minutes we found it. I gushed, “Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.” I think he thought I was the most tightly wound woman in San Francisco.
Some defenders call it, “continuous partial attention.” I think they are kidding themselves. Just that morning, I found myself unable to stop emailing while listening to an absolutely riveting KQED Forum radio show about our increasing propensity to text, IM, email, and watch videos while doing everything else. The Stanford study expected “heavy media multitaskers” to have special abilities, but instead, but all they found were deficits in their memory, efficiency, attention, and organizational skills, as compared to non-heavy-media multitaskers. HMMs have the illusion of productivity, but the brain’s switching costs, from emailing to IM to video to writing, are too high. The brain can only process one string of information at once.
Continue Reading →
Find Your Life Purpose in Five Easy Steps
Apr 23, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen | Filed under: Featured, Personal Growth, Solitude

1. Meet a friend at a café. Bring post-it notes.
2. Give your friend and yourself five post-it notes each. Tell your friend to write down the five most important things in his or her life, right now, at this moment. Do it yourself. You could write anything: a person, a feeling, a place, a way of being in the world, or a value.
3. After you have both written down your five things, lay them out on the table.
4. Now, you must give one of them up. Choose the first thing you would give away if you had to. What could you live without? Then, choose the second thing you would live without. Continue discarding things one by one.
5. The final post-it note is the one thing you don’t think you could live without. This is your life purpose, or you could also say, the most important thing in your life.
Where did this exercise come from? A new friend introduced it to me. My friend has been enormously successful as a doctor, academic, and biotech CEO, but the purpose of his life wasn’t completely self-evident to him until he went through a period of dedicated inquiry. He offered to do this exercise with me (he supplied the post-its) and explained that you can do the exercise repeatedly. The answers might change over time. He says the challenge is to live your life to truly serve that final post-it note (or rather, what you wrote in it) and to constantly ask yourself whether what you are doing is aligned with that which is most important to you. He’s on something of a mission to help other people drill down into their life purposes. He often encourages other CEOs (who think he’s crazy) to go through the post-it exercise. Their default most-important-thing is often to make money (to provide for their families), but a more specific answer is more of a guide.
I won’t tell you my life purpose because it seems more interesting to let that by mysterious, but I will say, It’s been an illuminating exercise that continues to resonate. I’ve been thinking about the last post-it I left on the table a few times a week, asking myself whether the things I am actually doing, day-to-day, express what I wrote. Keeping a central theme in mind makes life feel more sacred and less random.
The next morning, I couldn’t resist sharing this exercise with my roommate. And then with friends. So I wanted to share it with a larger audience, including you.
Order a latte and whip out some post-it notes. Bon courage.
Continue Reading →
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