So many people asked me why I called this blog "To the Moon and Back." There are three answers.
1. My mom's favorite book to read to me when I was a wee little one was Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney.
Appropriately, it came out the same year I was born: 1994. There are many ways to measure love in this delightful book, but our favorite was when the rabbits say:
2. An ex-friend/ex-boyfriend/ex-nothing of mine told me about this book called Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik when I told him that I was traveling to Paris. I am not a pretentious writer, so I didn't know who Adam Gopnik was (turns out he's a writer for The New Yorker--some knowledgeable person I am) and therefore I never read the book. But I include it here because every good book title has a pretentious backstory (i.e., The Fault in Our Stars, Go Set a Watchman, etc.).
To add a twist to this anecdote, Jamie has read this book! She had to read it for the class that brought her to Paris. Good call, Jamie. Good call.
3. The last reason involves a tidbit from when I visited my dear friend Alex in Florence for the first time in 2011. I told Alex that a man in Rome had already asked me if I was Japanese--well, he didn't ask me. He just shouted, "KONICHIWA!" at me.
Alex laughed and said that one of his Taiwanese friends had the same problem in Florence. She eventually got so sick of all the questions that she would just tell the pestering people that she was from the Moon.
Oh, I would've loved to see the confusion on their faces.
*
So that is that. Everything you didn't want to know about the title of this blog! And by the way...
BONUS: Katie Willard rambles for far too long.
