Don’t believe in climate change? Congratulations. But this isn’t the Rapture. Whether you believe or not, you’re coming along for the ride. This means that, if you live in New Mexico, you’re going to experience higher temperatures, worsening drought conditions, conifer forest die-offs and variable precipitation.

I’m sprawled on my belly at Ten Thousand Waves, languishing in The Fountainhead, milking these last few moments of mid-fall sunshine for all the vitamin D they’re worth, while my boyfriend’s eyes are glued to an old man’s scrotum.

Let me just get this out of the way up front: None of us would be here without sex. If you disagree with this statement, then I encourage you to go locate Wikipedia’s entry on “The birds and the bees.”

I’ve agreed to accompany my friend Daniel to the first Look to the Horizon: Scholarship Performance, and while I’m excited to share a cultural happening with an awesome human, my expectations are still hovering slightly below rock bottom. As a dance snob so often underwhelmed by the shows I frequent in New York and Los Angeles, I hardly expect Santa Fe’s local teen contingent to dazzle me.

Occupy Wall Street is more than a protest: It’s democracy.

“The revolution will not be televised. It will be on the internet.”

I was suspended from a Velcro chin-strap, bobbing in the chlorine-stinky swimming pool I shared with a handful of geriatric stroke victims three times a week, when I decided I was going to be an aerialist.

Here in Santa Fe, the green arrow is second only to the standard-issue Subaru wagon in its everywhere, all the time, every lane ubiquity.

As a rebel Aquarian, I’ve yet to cozy up to Independence Day and the requisite summertime frolic that trails its threadbare ideals.

My girlfriend and I sat in the trunk of the SUV we’d practically been living out of for the past week and a half and toasted to all the things about New Mexico, good and bad, that we had learned in 1,700 miles of exploration: